Astoria-After
by Colubrina
Summary: Astoria's memories all disappear, but why, and who stands to benefit? This is an AU fic where I've played fast and loose with all sorts of things, starting with the age difference between Astoria and Draco, moving on to the way in which Tom Riddle is not so nice, and just continuing on from there. Drastoria. ON HAITUS WHILE WAITING FOR ME TO HAVE TIME TO DO A MASSIVE REWRITE
1. Chapter 1

_**Summary: Astoria's memories all disappear, but why, and who stands to benefit. This is an AU fic where I've played fast and loose with all sorts of things, starting with the age difference between Astoria and Draco, moving on to the way in which Tom Riddle is not so nice, and just continuing on from there. Also, I have stopped writing this. There are 8 chapters and after that it stops. Maybe posting it will inspire me to keep going; people often have things to say that kick start creativity. But don't get too attached.**_

It happened in the hall outside their common room. Draco was leaning up against the wall, bored, half-listening to Astoria prattle on about whatever tedious thing she was planning – one of the endless parties pureblood girls seemed to live to throw, he supposed – and thinking to himself that at least she was pretty and he was reasonably fond of her and how much more that was than so many people got from their arranged marriages when she suddenly stopped talking and blinked a few times.

"You okay, love?" he asked, more out of the courtesy that had been drilled into him from birth than from any actual concern. Astoria Greengrass had never been anything other than 'okay'. She was polished - shellacked to a wholly impenetrable sheen - and he'd never seen her admit to anything being even slightly the matter with her.

"Who are you?" she asked, looking at him.

"Don't play games, Astoria," he snapped. This wasn't like her and he wasn't amused. "You know perfectly well who I am."

"I… no." She shook her head, that perfect hair swinging to and fro. "I'm Astoria?"

Draco studied her and frowned; this really was not like her at all. "I think," he said slowly, "I should take you down to the infirmary. Maybe you aren't feeling well?"

"That… yes." She reached a hand out to the wall as if to steady herself. "That would be very thoughtful of you. Thank you."

He held his arm out and, automatically, she placed her hand over it. So, he mused. Whatever she's playing at, not knowing me, not knowing _herself_ , she still knows her manners. He walked her down the hall, waiting for her to faint or announce "gotcha" or _something_ but she didn't. She just walked placidly by his side, far more subdued than he'd ever seen her and he grew steadily more concerned.

"Astoria," he stopped her right outside the entry to the infirmary. "You know I'll stand by you no matter what, right? That I won't leave you."

She searched his eyes. "That's very kind of you. I just don't know… why."

He tilted his head slightly to the side and eyed her. "Because you're my affianced bride and, despite our mutual indifference to one another, I take my responsibilities seriously. I take you seriously."

"I'm your _what_?" Astoria pulled her hand off his arm and stared at him, a tide of hysteria starting to rise in her eyes.

"Since you were eleven and I was twelve," he said slowly. "If you've developed an aversion to…"

"I don't even _know_ you," she said, her voice starting to shake.

"Astoria, you _do_." He reached out and touched her shoulder but she shrank back.

"I don't even know your _name_ ," she said, pressing herself into the wall.

"I'm Draco Malfoy," he said, watching her carefully. "And something has happened to you. Let's get you into the infirmary and let the Healer take a look at you, see if she can get you feeling more normal." He paused. "Astoria, I would never hurt you. Whatever else you know or don't know right now, hold on to that."

He held his hand out and she nodded, a tiny frightened nod that tugged at his heart, then slipped her fingers into his. He's never _ever_ seen her like this and, however much he's never regarded Astoria as more than, at most, the best among the various poor choices his father deemed acceptable as a bride, he finds himself worried for her. This woman – this scared girl holding his hand – isn't the polished heiress he'd been talking to 5 minutes earlier.

He needs to talk to his father, and now.

He needs to get her in front of Madame Pomfrey and get this _fixed._

. . . . . . . . .

"I'm afraid there's no fix." Madame Pomfrey looked down at the girl cowering in the bed, clutching Draco Malfoy's hand like a lifeline. They'd tried to chase Draco away but he'd coolly cited pureblood customs, which had the force of law, and noted that as her fiancé he had every right to sit at her side.

Dumbledore hadn't expected the young Malfoy to be quite so adamant in his championing of Miss Greengrass. By all accounts, the two of them were no closer than any of the other students shoved into arranged marriages by their parents. Dumbledore thought the tradition of hand-fasting barely pubescent children rather appalling, and had been pleased that the number of engaged students dropped every year but he wasn't surprised the wretched Malfoys were still doing it, or that the Greengrasses had leapt at the chance to snare the boy.

"What do you mean, 'no fix,'" Draco snapped, pale and young but still holding on to the girl's hand. She was watching him, Dumbledore noted with dismay, as if he were the only thing she could trust in a world gone mad. "She's forgotten _everything_."

"Not exactly," Dumbledore twinkled at the boy. "She's only forgotten her personal memories. Who she is, who you are, what she got for the sixth birthday, things like that. She knows how to read, for example, she remembers all her magical training. She's just going to have to re-meet all her friends. I admit she's a bit of a blank slate at the moment but it really could be much worse, my dear boy."

"I think," Madame Pomfrey interjected, "You should let her rest, go back to your classes."

"I will stay here by her side until she asks me to leave," Draco said with a fixed determination that had Madame Pomfrey and Dumbledore exchanging glances. "If you'd ask Theodore Nott to bring me my assignments from today I can start working while she sleeps."

"I'm not tired," Astoria complained.

"Nevertheless," Madame Pomfrey smiled at her, "I think you should stay here for a day or two to recover and for observation."

"I'll have young Mr. Nott bring you your books, then," Dumbledore said with a small frown, watching Draco nod and turn from him, stroke the girl's hand to reassure her. Who would have thought he'd be so devoted. It seemed out of character but, Dumbledore supposed, he probably thought she'd be better in a week and he'd have won all sorts of points he could use to manipulate her.

"Astoria," Draco said as the two observers left, "other than the memory loss, how do you feel?"

"Terrified," she said with a forced little laugh. "I don't remember _anything_ before I was looking at you in the corridor. Other than the nurse and that man, you're the only person I know in the world."

"Well," he kept petting her hand. "Theo will be here soon and you can meet him."

"Do I like him?" she asked.

"Well enough, I guess," Draco shrugged. "Though, I'm starting to think it might not matter who you liked yesterday."

"I guess a better question would be, does _he_ like _me?"_

Draco laughed. "Well, he's more my friend than yours, so he's never crossed any boundaries because, well…"

"Fiancé," she said and tentatively grinned at him. "Tell me about myself. What am I like?"

"You're…" Draco looked at her and sighed. "You're pretty, you have excellent grooming, you know how to throw a party. My mother says you'll be a renowned hostess by the time you're 20 and she has high standards so that's quite a compliment. You're an indifferent student and you're always surrounded by a group of girls who giggle a lot."

"No... what am I _like_." She looked down at the blanket that the Healer had firmly tucked around her and pushed it aside with a grimace of annoyance. "We're to be married. Surely you know more about me than that I dress well."

"Not really," he admitted and flushed when she looked at him, a rather incredulous expression on her face. "You're a tad opaque, Astoria. Very… you have an excellent presentation but I'm not sure we've ever had a conversation about anything more personal than things like what you're going to wear to a party so I know what color corsage to get you."

"That seems a little depressing," she stood up. "Let's go for a walk or something." He glanced up towards the door and she rolled her eyes. "It's not my legs that are broken, it's my brain. Are you really such a rule follower?"

"Hardly," he snorted and held out his hand. "Milady, let me lead you over to yonder window seat."

"Not much of a walk," she complained.

"Yeah, well, I'm still a little afraid you might suddenly collapse, plus I'm waiting for Theo to show up with my books. Humor my selfishness and settle for a trip to the window."

She took his hand and let him lead her across the room to a small niche with a padded seat and a window. He carefully settled her down and sat across from her; the bench was so small their knees touched and he took her hands in his. "Why are we engaged," she asked him, "if you don't know anything about me other than what colors I wear?"

"Arranged marriage," he said with a frown.

"Then," she dipped her head down rather shyly, "why are you _here_? Sitting with me, talking to me. We obviously don't really _do_ this if don't know anything about me. Why not go back to your friends and dinner and…"

"Because you're going to be my _wife_ ," he said in frustration. "I don't have to _like_ you, though I do – did – in a rather idle way. I have to _honor_ you and what kind of an utter arse would I be if I left you alone right now?"

"I think I'd rather be liked," she muttered and, at his sharp look, sighed. "Not something I'd say?"

"Not really." He bit the inside of his cheek. If this didn't get better, if Pomfrey was right – and for all he didn't like the old biddy he had to admit she was a damn good Healer – he was suddenly engaged to what seemed to be a totally different person. More open. More… likeable, though probably less to his father's taste. He had trouble imagining this vulnerable girl coolly presiding over one of her parties.

"I know more about you than I do about myself," she said, running her fingers through his and sliding them up and down his arms, a kind of girlish playfulness he's never seen from her before. "You're older than I am – "

"Yes," he nodded. "One reason we're not that close, really."

"You have a heavy sense of obligation, of doing what you're supposed to."

He snorted at that but at her look shrugged and nodded. "I guess."

"You're kind, kinder than you'd like to admit I suspect."

"That I'm not."

"Kind to me," she insisted. "You're sitting here."

"The fiancé thing, you know, puts you in a bit of a category by yourself. I assure you, no one else would call me 'kind'."

Even as he was smiling at her, rather liking this new world where he actually spoke to his future wife, she was going on. "And you have some kind of a scar on your arm." She pushed back his sleeve and exposed the Dark Mark and stared at it. "What is that?"

He yanked the sleeve back down again and pulled away from her. "Nothing you need to worry about. Nothing you should mention to anyone."

"A secret," she grinned at him, that thing where she really was younger than him bubbling to the top and he pressed his lips together; this could be bad.

"I mean it, Astoria," his voice was low. "You can't tell anyone about that."

She looked at his arm then back at his face and, watching her assess him he was struck by how much more perceptive this memory-less Astoria seemed to be; he realized, with some shock, that she must have _always_ been that way, she'd just hidden it so well under her sleek and shallow image that he'd never noticed. "I think," she said, "you should explain why."

"I told you," he sounded desperate now, "it's nothing you need to worry about."

"Then explain it to me and I won't worry." She paused, "Otherwise I might have to ask someone else about it. Like that deceptively nice Dumbledore."

Draco paled, then laughed. "Your brain gets fried and you're still a Slytherin."

"Is that good?"

"Normally I'd say yes but given how serious this is…"

She put her hand over his. "I wouldn't, Draco, I was just teasing; I can tell you're… this is something… it's not a joke, is it? But, please, just tell me. You're the only thing I have, the only thing that's not some kind of abstract knowledge floating around in my head with no context. I know how to read, but I can't remember learning how. I know in what order I should greet people at a party, but I can't remember anyone ever telling me that. It's… it's very…"

"Shh." He brought her hands to his lips. "I'll take care of you, Astoria. It'll be okay."

"And you'll tell me?"

"I will," he sighed. "But not here. Someplace safe." He eyed her. "What did you mean, 'deceptively nice'?"

She shrugged, "He was hiding something, and he wasn't happy you were staying."

. . . . . . . . . .

She finally did chase him away; Theo, the mysterious Theo, never had arrived with the books and she could tell he was getting grouchy. "Go eat," she'd said. "Track down your friend. Get your books."

"I'm coming back after dinner," he'd said, watching her with narrowed eyes. "I'm not leaving you alone in this place. Something's _wrong_. You shouldn't have just lost all your memories like that."

Now she sat, having pushed the bland hospital food away, and stared at the window where they'd sat earlier from her bed. He was right. Something was wrong, and it wasn't so much that she'd lost her memories but that no one seemed that concerned about it. That Healer had done very little more than pat her on the head and tell her not to worry, sure, it was a permanent memory loss but she'd be fine. No calling in of specialists, no research to find other, similar cases to see if there were any treatments she could try. Nothing. And that Headmaster, he'd looked at Draco like the boy was in his way and that made no sense at all. Why wouldn't he want her to be comforted by her fiancé; as surreal as the idea she was engaged seemed, no one appeared to question Draco's claim so she guessed he was telling the truth. And it would be _normal_ for her fiancé to sit with her if she were injured, wouldn't it?

Draco was the only one she'd interacted with in her entire conscious life, all several hours of it, who didn't seem to have secrets. Well, he had secrets. Whatever that thing was on his arm he absolutely wanted that kept hidden, but that wasn't about her. The others, they had secrets about her.

"I'm Astoria," she said to herself. "And I'm engaged to a boy a year older than me who has a mark on his arm he doesn't want to talk about but who seems to be the only person I can trust."

It wasn't a lot of things to know about one's life.

"Hey," a girl stuck her head around the door and then tiptoed into the room when Astoria looked at her. "I'm not supposed to be up here but I heard you'd gotten sick and I wanted to see if there was anything I could bring you."

Astoria smiled at her, dredging some kind of social mask up from someplace. "That's so nice of you. I'm afraid I seem to have gotten hit with a memory curse of some sort, though, and I don't remember you. You're going to have to remind me of your name."

The girl took that as permission to come over and sat down on the foot of the bed. "That's awful, Tory." She frowned. "I'm Ginny. We're… kind of friends."

"Kind of friends?" Astoria looked at the pretty red head and waited for an explanation, wondering why, out of the four people she'd met, three of them seemed to be lying to her.

"Well, inter-house friendships are sort of frowned on, especially between Slytherin and Gryffindor but we've been kind of chums since we started using the same table in the library to study at."

"Oh." Astoria slumped in her bed. "Maybe you could tell me about myself, then. I don't remember _anything_. I mean, I remember stuff like potions and what year it is, but not… people stuff."

Ginny leaned forward, a little too eagerly, and said, "Oh, well, you're really popular. You have a lot of friends, and being engaged to Malfoy doesn't hurt, not that you're all that thrilled about that but he's kind of a king of the hill sort, so…"

"I'm not happy about that? What do you mean?"

Ginny shrugged. "You've just said a couple of times that he's… you know… he's a bit older and he's kind of dismissive of you. Thinks you're an idiot, stuff like that. And he's not that nice. I mean, it's Malfoy." She shrugged again. "I mean, Harry thinks he's a Death Eater and, even if he's not now he probably will be soon."

"Harry?"

"Harry Potter." Ginny's eye widened. "You don't remember _Harry_? He was the one who said he'd get you out if you ever wanted to escape, that he'd…"

"Escape what?"

Ginny lowered her voice. "You said you didn't want to be trapped in that pureblood, Death Eater thing, that you wanted to get out but that you were afraid, that you had nowhere to go. He said the Order would take care of you, that no one should have to marry Malfoy, of all people."

"The Order?" Astoria shook her head. "I… this is so confusing. Ginny… I don't remember any of this."

Ginny looked around nervously. "Look, I have to get out of here before Pomfrey catches me. But I'll come back, we can talk some more. Just… you have friends, Astoria, and not just that bunch of Slytherin airheads you hide behind. Remember that."

The girl disappeared and Astoria looked at the indent where she'd been sitting on the bed. Why had this girl come all the way up here and talked to her, every line of her body screaming, "I'm lying." What did she want?

She thinks I'm a pawn, she thought, on someone else's board; she thinks to play me. She wasn't sure whether Astoria-Before had minded being manipulated but she was quite sure that she, Astoria-After, did.


	2. Chapter 2

Draco watched the owl fly away. Quidditch is good, he'd written, but I'm a little worried about my Potions marks. His father would know immediately that meant, "I need to talk to you, and here."

He passed Harry Potter, walking with his ginger girlfriend, on his own way back to the infirmary; he loathed that boy. Aside from all the usual schoolyard rivalries there was that putrid self-righteousness that reeked off all the Order members. Life is so simple for you, isn't it, so black and white, Draco thought. And you never stop to ask yourself whether your side might not be the unblemished white hats. Defend the status quo, little boy, little boy who lived only because of your mother's accidental dip into blood magic. You've not got much longer before that warding expires and the war begins in earnest.

He wondered, sometimes, if Harry Potter knew the magic that protected him was generally, like all blood magic, considered Dark. He suspected not. Not a particularly nuanced thinker, that Harry Potter.

Not, of course, that Draco himself was an especially nice boy. No white hat here, he thought as he approached the infirmary and his mysteriously confused fiancé. He'd almost choked when Astoria had called him 'kind'. Their engagement was supposed to mean something beyond a guaranteed dance at Yule parties, had obligations other than a nice present on her birthday, but honoring that commitment hardly made him 'kind.'

She was sitting up, staring at her bed with a focused expression on her face. If he'd seen that look the day before he would have assumed she'd tasted something off, or run into one of the terminally irritating Gryffindors.

"Did you find Theo?" she asked, barely glancing up.

"Yes," he sat in the chair by her bed. "Oddly enough he hadn't gotten any message to bring me my books."

"Not that odd," she muttered.

He frowned at her and she finally turned her complete attention to him. "Can we be overheard here?" she asked, very quietly.

"Probably," he admitted.

"Then we'll talk later." She paused. "You'll stay, right?"

"All night." He took her hand again. "They won't be happy about it but the peal both our fathers would ring over their heads if they kicked me out against your wishes would be loud, strident, and unpleasant for everyone involved; it's my job – my obligation - to protect you and I doubt anyone would question that a woman who can't remember anyone could use a comforting presence at her side."

"Protect me? How quaint," she said, wrinkling her nose.

He laughed at the face she made. "Well, it's a custom not much honored these days, but, given the circumstances, I intend to." He hesitated. "My father should be here tomorrow. I want him to take a look at you, if you don't mind."

"Pomfrey says there's nothing to be done," she objected, but he could hear a little spark of hope suddenly ignited in her voice.

"Yeah, well, we'll see." Draco opened one of his books and spread some parchment out along another one and began writing. "Homework beckons, princess, but I'm not going anywhere."

She lay down, then, on her side and watched him as he wrote, checking his book now and again, but mostly just steadily working on his essay. The light hit his hair making him look rather charmingly, if incongruously, like an angel. She drifted into sleep as she watched him and, finally, he bent down over and pulled a blanket across her, brushing his lips against her forehead. "Don't worry, Astoria," he whispered. "I'll make this okay. You're safe with me."

. . . . . . . . . .

Lucius Malfoy strode into Hogwarts before the elves had finished clearing breakfast. A quick question in the main hall – do you know where I might find my son? – and he got to the infirmary before Dumbledore managed to intercept him.

"Draco," he looked at the boy propped in a chair, asleep next to the bed. That one word and the child was on his feet, across the room, and saying in an undertone, "She's lost all her personal memories. Everything. And no one seems to be all that concerned. I thought you'd want - "

Lucius Malfoy nodded and, without sparing a glance for the door he knew would soon be crowded with school officials, sat in the chair Draco had just vacated. Astoria was awake, watching him with an expression that surprised him. He'd never regretted binding his son to this girl; she was pretty and polite and the political marriage had brought her father over to the Death Eaters. He had to admit, however, he'd always thought she was a little dull. He'd even expressed concerns to Narcissa; would Draco be bored, he'd asked her, married to a woman so lacking in cleverness? Narcissa had laughed at him. No stupid girl, she'd said, could have turned herself into the queen bee of Slytherin. She's smart enough, Narcissa had reassured him, she just hides it under that feather-brained mask. Now, with all her memories stolen from her, Lucius saw that smart girl peering up at him.

"Miss Astoria," he said, "I understand you might not remember me but I'm Lucius Malfoy, Draco's father and your future father-in-law."

"It's nice to meet you, Mr. Malfoy," the girl said, before faltering a little. "Well, I guess I've met you before. I'm sorry." She smiled at him, a charming expression of dismay. "I'm not quite sure what the appropriate etiquette is for this situation."

"No matter, child, you are delightful no matter what," he said as he smiled down at her. "I'd like to invite you to come recuperate at the Manor this weekend. Perhaps some time in your own suite will help trigger the return of your memories and, of course, I'll bring in one of the best mind healers to take a look at you."

"Lucius." Dumbledore had made it to the doorway and loomed there, twinkling. "You cannot simply take the child away from school. Whatever Draco's relationship is to her – and I find it highly inappropriate that he spent the night at her side – she will not leave the grounds with you. Not without her own parents' permission."

"Dumbledore." Lucius stood and turned to face the older wizard, nodding an acknowledgment before saying, "Draco, go send an owl to Mr. Greengrass. Tell him I require his presence at Hogwarts immediately."

Draco looked at Astoria and, at her tiny nod, slipped away.

Once the boy had left Lucius laughed. "You don't really think the boy would have abandoned her if she were scared or injured, do you Dumbledore? He knows his responsibilities."

Dumbledore frowned. "Still, Lucius, teenaged children…"

"Nothing was stopping you from adding a chaperone to the room," Lucius said dismissively. "But you know as well as I do he'd no more dishonor the girl before their wedding than he'd cut off his own hand, however many half-bloods he may be tumbling in broom closets. Or are you questioning my son's ethics?"

"No one," Dumbledore said evenly, "has ever suggested Draco is anything but dedicated to old ways, old customs."

"Good." Lucius smiled at the girl who was watching their fencing match with a tight smile of her own on her face. "Once your father gets here, my dear, we'll get you whisked off to more comfortable surroundings."

It took exactly forty-seven minutes from the time Draco left to send an owl to when Mr. Greengrass walked into the infirmary. "Why am I wasting my time here," he demanded, glaring at Dumbledore who still stood against the wall, fingers touching, watching Lucius with apparently endless patience. "Mr. Malfoy is authorized to act in loco parentis for Astoria, for both girls, and has been since Astoria started school." Unlike the aristocratic drawl Lucius Malfoy affected, Astoria's father spoke in a clipped fashion, as though he couldn't spare extra moments to slow down.

"I was unaware of that," Dumbleddore said smoothly.

"Well, next time check your paperwork before I have to be summoned to give some pointless and redundant permission for her to leave. Thank goodness that Draco of yours has some sense, Lucius. Filled me in on things while walking me here. Good lad. Understand he's barely left her side since the incident, whatever it was." He looked briskly at the girl in the bed. "Sorry to hear you've had a rough day, Astoria. I'm sure Lucius will get you patched up. You can trust him. I do." Turning back to the headmaster he snorted and said, "If you'd actually done your job the girl could have been resting and under the care of specialist at Malfoy Manor by now instead of sitting here watching a bunch of grown men glare at one another.

"Astoria, I'll send an elf to get your things packed for a weekend stay. Please give Narcissa my love. Really, I was in the middle of a quite complicated negotiation, Dumbledore and I need to return to my job. Not all of us can twinkle our way around incompetence. Good to see you, as always Lucius." And with another nod the man turned and left.

"And that," Draco whispered to Astoria, "was your father."

"Is he always like that?" she whispered back.

"No, sometimes he's a bit brusque and rude," Draco said so only she could hear, and she covered her face with her hand to hide her smile.

"Miss Astoria." Lucius offered the girl his arm and, looking hesitantly at Draco she stood and took it. "It's all right, my dear," the older man said. "Draco won't begrudge me the pleasure of a walk at the side of a beautiful girl. Besides," the man raised his voice slightly, "he needs to fetch his things so he can come home for the weekend as well. He's not sick so I think he can do his own packing, don't you?"

Astoria smiled at him, charmed and relieved Draco would be going with her to this Manor and its promise of a specialist.

"Meet us at the front door, Draco," Lucius said. "I'll walk the lovely Miss Astoria down and answer any concerns Professor Dumbledore has along the way." He gestured for the headmaster to accompany him as he led the young girl out the door and down the hall. 'Don't dawdle, son."

"Yes, sir," Draco nodded. "I won't."

"Lucius Malfoy," Dumbledore said as they walked down the hall, "you cannot just hurry that girl out of here. She's just had a very traumatic – "

"Exactly. And I'm most concerned that any child, much less my son's future wife, should have been quite so badly cursed while she's at what should be the safety of her own school."

"Cursed," Dumbledore objected, "that seems a bit presumptive."

Lucius stopped walking. "You have another theory, Headmaster?"

There was a long pause, and then Dumbledore said, "She'll return on Monday? Madame Pomfrey tells me she hasn't lost any of her academic knowledge and classes may provide some structure that will help as she begins to re-meet all her classmates."

"Of course." Lucius began walking again. "Unless the specialist recommends otherwise."

At the front door, while they waited for Draco to return, Lucius Malfoy gently settled Astoria into a seat and turned to Dumbledore. "One question I do have, Dumbledore. I was unaware Madame Pomfrey was an expert in memory charm diagnosis. I thought she was more of a general practitioner, good at setting broken bones and undoing the dreadful things magical school children do to one another?"

Dumbledore nodded.

"Then why, in Merlin's name, didn't you call in a specialist yourself for the girl?"

. . . . . . . . . .

They barely cleared the threshold of Malfoy Manor before Astoria turned to Draco and demanded, "Who's Ginny?"

"Ginny?" He looked at her in confusion. Of all the things he'd expected her to say once they were safely away from the school, he'd never thought she'd ask a question about one of the Weasleys.

"Long ginger hair. Showed up last night after the message to Theo to bring you your books went so conveniently astray and told me a lot of things."

"Ginevra Weasely?" Lucius handed his cloak off to a servant who discreetly left the room. "Might an old man inquire as to what her girlish confidences were?"

"Well, apparently she and I are dear chums," Astoria said, her voice spiraling up into near hysteria. "I don't care for Draco, and someone named Harry Potter has offered to rescue me from the clutches of the Death Eaters. I'm not even sure what Death Eaters are but almost every other word out of her mouth was a lie so – "

Draco had been rolling up his sleeve as she spoke and he held out his arm and said, "This is a Death Eater, Astoria. I'm a Death Eater and while, as I mentioned, we've historically been fairly indifferent to one another, I hardly think you need rescuing from me."

Astoria stopped her rant and stared at him. "The Mark," she whispered. "You're a whatever it is, Death Eater. That's your secret. Ginny said you were, or near enough as to make no difference. That was the truth she was lacing in to her story."

"How utterly fascinating," Lucius said. "How did you know she was mostly lying, or that she was threading just a little bit of truth through her tale? I'd think losing all your personal memories would have made it difficult to read the girl."

But Astoria shook her head. "Her body language, it was… I could tell. She blinked too much, closed her eyes at important parts of her story. Turned away from me instead of towards me, except when she said Draco was a Death Eater. Then she held my gaze and… it was… it was obvious. I didn't need to know _her_ to know she was lying. Dumbledore was better, but…"

"Pardon me for interrupting." Lucius tipped his head. "Dumbledore lied to you as well?"

"Not exactly," she hesitated, "but he… he was hiding something. So was Madame Pomfrey. She was just too… cheerful… about her diagnosis. He - Dumbledore - didn't want Draco to stay with me and as soon as he was gone, off to track down the books that never arrived, then that Ginny girl was there. It was as though she was waiting for me to be alone."

"She probably was," Draco muttered.

"As I said, fascinating. I do hope the discovery that your fiancé is one of the evil cadre you've been warned about by Miss Weasley won't be upsetting to you," Lucius smiled at Astoria. "I'm afraid you're quite surrounded by us but, as dastardly as we are, how about, instead of indulging in whatever the wickedness du jour is, we get you settled and maybe then you can take a walk around the gardens. It's a pleasant day, there's no reason to keep you tucked abed, and you should make yourself at home; after all, this will be your home soon enough. Draco can give you the tour in case your memories of the house and grounds have been misplaced as well."

Astoria was starting to get hysterical again, the strain of the last day and night finally wearing away the patina of her self control. "I don't know why everyone keeps lying to me. Pomfrey and Dumbledore both are hiding something, and this Ginny girl is spinning some elaborate story, knowing I couldn't remember whether it was true or not, and…"

As her voice rose again, becoming shrill and filled with fear, Draco pulled her into his arms. "It's okay, Astoria. I promise, I won't lie to you. I haven't lied to you. You know that, you do. We'll get this straightened out. Calm down, love."

"Draco is quite right," Lucius gestured to Narcissa, who'd entered the room. "I can promise you, child, none of us will lie to you. We want to find out why you can't remember things, and, if it can be done, return those memories to you. I can't guarantee it's possible, of course, but right now why don't you go with Narcissa to your suite, see if that seems familiar; she'll have the elves bring you a calming tea before Draco escorts you on a walk, how does that sound? We have quite a renowned legilimans in residence at the moment and I'll ask if he'll let himself be imposed upon to take a quick look at your mind. We'll know soon enough what can be done for you."

As Narcissa led the shaking girl out of the room and towards her suite Draco asked, shocked, "Do you really think the Dark Lord will take the time to diagnose a teenage girl?"

"Let's see, she's been cursed with a sophisticated memory charm, which Dumbledore tried to keep under wraps. She's got Order members telling her tales about how close she is to them and dropping hints about Death Eaters? I doubt I could keep him away from her even if I wanted to."

. . . . . . . . . .

 **A/N – Thank you all for reading and reviewing.**


	3. Chapter 3

After a cup of tea and a moment to collect herself in private Astoria felt considerably better and was happy to walk through the extensive gardens the surrounded the Manor with Draco. He led her, her hand on his arm, along a series of somewhat rustic stone pathways and pointed out the various beds and flowers as they strolled. It was clear that not only was Narcissa proud of her gardening skill but that Draco had spent a significant amount of time helping her. Astoria leaned her head against his shoulder as they stood outside an herb maze and he pointed out the rosemary and she considered the young man at her side. He was about to unlatch the gate that would let them enter the maze when they were interrupted.

"Would it be terribly rude of me to take over and walk with the lady for a bit?"

Astoria watched Draco go paler, something she wouldn't have thought possible, and he held her hand a little more tightly.

"You needn't have any concerns," the man continued. He was handsome, she noticed, with dark hair and blue eyes and body language that screamed 'trust me', though she found that she didn't, or not entirely. "I promise, I'll return her in one piece. I simply want to look at what seems to have happened to her in a more informal setting. Bringing her into a clinic might be stressful for her, and that could make the entire process less pleasant. I'm sure you don't want that."

Draco nodded stiffly and dropped her hand. "I'll see you back at the house." He stared at her as though he wanted to reassure himself she was all right before nodding, almost bowing, to the other man. He'd turned and had walked almost to the bend in the pathway before Astoria spoke.

"He's afraid of you."

"Most people are," the man said, reaching down to pick a sprig of the rosemary and tucking it behind her ear. "Tom Riddle, at your service."

"Should I be?"

"Afraid of me?" The man, this Tom Riddle, offered her his arm and she took it. "I can't think of why."

"Then why is Draco?" she persisted.

"Ah, well." He led her through the gate, down the path, carefully helping her around a rose bush that had grown over the walkway and reached towards them, thorns at the ready. "Young love, of course. It makes a man possessive and he's worried that I might hurt you. I do have a history of hurting people, albeit not often on walks in the pleasant gardens of a Manor where I'm a guest. Still, in general, all my Death Eaters are a little wary of me. It's good for the rank and file to have some caution when dealing with me. Keeps them honest."

"So you're the leader, then?" She looked up at the man and frowned. "I… there was a picture. In the paper." She shook her head, as if she could loosen stuck memories with the movement. "An attack on the Ministry. You. Others. The photo." She sighed in frustration, unable to recall more than the barest outline of the news. "You didn't look quite like you do now."

The man laughed, a cultured, amused sound. "No? More like this perhaps?"

And then a glamour was in place. She looked at the man – the monster – standing at her side. Pale, oddly deformed. He looked terrifyingly inhuman, though, in truth, she was more impressed by the perfection of the silent, wandless glamour than scared by the disguise itself. Glamours were both the easiest and hardest spells to learn. To do them badly, oh, that was easy. But they tended to look fake, like a mask. Expressions didn't quite translate, hair didn't swing correctly. It was easy to turn blond hair black, hard to make that black hair reflect light as it moved in a way that seemed real. This, though, this was perfect. She stared at him in fascination, dropping her hand from his arm and circling around to examine him from every side.

"That's marvelous," she finally said. "Striking fear into the hearts of your enemies, I assume?"

He dropped the mask and regarded her, a curious, probing expression blossoming on his once again handsome face. "You aren't afraid of it?"

"You did tell me I had nothing to fear from you," she pointed out.

"That wasn't quite what I said," he corrected. "I said I couldn't think of why you would be afraid, not that you had nothing to fear."

"Hair-splitting," she said.

"You are an interesting girl, Astoria Greengrass."

"That's exactly what I'm not," she said, frowning as she took his arm again, as they continued walking towards the end of the path. "I'm… I'm not even here. I'm just this body of knowledge walking around with no context."

"Mmm." He picked her up and swung her so she was seated on the stone wall that surrounded Narcissa's carefully cultivated herbs. "I hate to contradict you but you're quite interesting indeed, probably a good deal more so than you were yesterday when you were just another pretty girl with acceptable blood in her veins."

She shook her head again and he laughed. "Such charming self-deprecation; I wonder how much of that is innate to you and how much a learned skill, like your perfect manners. At any rate, my dear, along with being the Dark Lord, feared enemy of the Light, and worker of impressive glamour spells, I'm a talented legilimens and Lucius Malfoy has asked if I would take a look at what happened to you."

"Madame Pompfrey said it couldn't be fixed." She couldn't keep the bit of hope from creeping into her voice. If this man could make her affliction better, if she could know who people were again, remember how she knew things, not just that she knew them, that would… there was nothing she wouldn't do for someone who could fix this, she thought. Nothing. And nothing she wouldn't happily do _to_ anyone who'd made this happen.

"And your Madame Pomfrey might be right, though how she would know that, could have known that so quickly, interests me. Nevertheless, I think you'll be able to trust my assessment of your mind far more than hers." He looked into her eyes. "May I?"

"Do you actually need my permission?"

"No." He raised his eyebrows at her and she smiled back at the calculated charm. "But it seemed polite to ask. You are, after all, the fiancé of the son of one of my most devoted followers. Just ravaging your mind might cause dissent in the ranks and I'm so enjoying my stay with the Malfoys. I would hate it to be cut short."

"How long did it take to learn?" she asked, cocking her head to the side and studying him.

"The legilimancy?"

"No, the body language. It's _almost_ perfect but…"

"Most of my childhood." He smiled again, this one far more genuine. "You really are quite fascinating, Miss Astoria. Have you always been this good at reading people?"

"I haven't the faintest," she said and at that he laughed.

"Well, let's see if those memories are recoverable, shall we?"

She tipped her chin up toward him and felt… nothing. She'd expected to feel _something_ as this man, this dangerous, charming, brilliant man wandered through her brain but it really seemed like nothing more than staring into the eyes of someone who appeared, despite returning her gaze, to be distracted.

Finally he looked down. "I'm sorry," he said.

"They're all gone, aren't they?" she asked.

"Erased," he confirmed. "Not blocked, which is what I would have expected, what almost all memory curses and spells do. Actually gone."

She slouched a bit at that, though it was what she had expected. Pomfrey had been too sure, too confident in her diagnosis. "How did she know?" she asked him, not looking up.

"That," he said, helping her down off the wall, "is an excellent question."

. . . . . . . . . .

"Wiped clean," Tom Riddle, also known as Lord Voldemort, also known as the Dark Lord, said as he sat with Lucius Malfoy in a secluded study. They'd shooed the children away to the library and were both drinking good whiskey as they contemplated their new problem and the general maxim that problems were opportunities.

"I didn't realize that was even possible," Lucius admitted.

Riddle shrugged. "It shouldn't be. Isn't for most people. I can think of three wizards good enough at memory charms to do it, and do it so cleanly there's simply nothing left, all while leaving her a functioning person. It's impressive; she knows all the magic she's learned, she can walk and talk and reason. She can even flirt and she reads physical cues better than most adults who've made a study of it. Most people, trying to take away her personal memories, would end up just leaving her a drooling husk. Whoever did this to her was very good indeed."

Lucius took a sip from his whiskey and waited for the reveal. Riddle had always had a showman's sense of timing and a tendency to indulge in dramatics.

"Lockhart's in St. Mungo's, hoisted by his own petard, as well as those little Order children, after that unfortunate contretemps in the Chamber of Secrets."

Lucius flushed and Riddle looked amused.

"There's me, of course, but I know I didn't do it." The man took another sip and watched his host. "Whom do you think that leaves?"

"Dumbledore?" Lucius asked.

"Exactly."

"But why?" Lucius set his drink down on the nearby table with a loud clunk. "She's a nice enough girl, I was happy to engage her to Draco, but they weren't that close, she never struck me as especially clever. She was just… another ordinary girl."

"She never struck you as clever?" Riddle chuckled lightly.

"Well, not until this morning, no." Lucius stared at the amber liquid in his glass, still sloshing. "I've been reassessing that opinion. Still, don't tell me Dumbledore saw through that well-constructed mask to the smart girl hiding under it. He thought she was as much of a fool as I did."

"Counted on it, would be my guess." Riddle agreed. "And probably wasn't expecting Draco to be quite so adamant in his assertion of all his rights and privileges as her hand-fasted groom as he glued himself to her side. Certainly didn't expect the boy to call you in or for you to pull the girl out of school."

"That makes him the fool. Anyone who knows my son would know he's always fulfilled his obligations to that girl to the letter, whatever he actually thought of her."

Riddle frowned. "Does it bother you he's become more attached?

"No. Though I admit I'm a mite surprised," Lucius said.

"Why? That he prefers a girl who might require a bit of protecting, all while not being the shallow, somewhat dim nitwit she tell me she was two days ago? She's vulnerable and she's his intellectual equal. I'm surprised at your surprise, Lucius. It's like a recipe for adolescent romance." Riddle tsked at his host.

"Be that as it may, we've got to return her to Dumbledore on Monday, and what to do?"

"Tell her to cultivate that Ginevra, of course." Riddle leaned back in his chair and smiled. "They wanted, I think, a rather dull blank slate they could manipulate into believing anything they told her about herself, about Draco, about us. They wanted someone who would be at his side at every formal event for years, just his dull, socialite fiancé, who could be taught to dislike him and report everything she saw to her real friends in the Order. Instead they got a clever little minx with an astonishing ability to read body language who trusts exactly one person in this world."

"Draco."

"Exactly. It's so rarely one's handed the perfect double agent. Do you know what she was thinking as I searched for her missing memories?"

"I find myself certain you're about to tell me." Lucius settled back into his seat and picked up his glass again. He suspected vapid – or not so vapid, as today had suggested - little Astoria had a vengeful streak in her. After all, Narcissa liked her and if someone had wiped Narcissa's mind his wife would have walked over glass and through fire to murder the people who'd attacked her, if by 'murder' you meant 'cut into pieces slowly over a span of multiple weeks'. Perhaps he should have paid more attention to Narcissa's fondness for the girl instead of dismissing her as dim.

Riddle smiled. "She was thinking that she'd do anything for anyone who could 'fix' her - "

"You can't fix her." Lucius objected.

"- and that she'd do anything _to_ the people who did this to her. And she's not exactly unclear on who she suspects."

"Using a child as a spy, though?"

"You have objections?" Riddle raised his eyebrows as he took a drink from his glass.

Lucius laughed at that. "Even if I did you wouldn't listen to them."

Tom Riddle stood up. "I didn't decide the game board would be in a school but I'll not refuse to play out of morals the other side doesn't possess."

. . . . . . . . . .

Draco ran his hands over her shoulders and studied her. "You're really okay? He didn't… hurt you?" She'd been subdued ever since she returned from her tete-a-tete with the Dark Lord, who'd promptly handed her back over to Draco and closeted himself with Lucius. Draco and Astoria had been told to "go amuse yourselves in the library," which clearly meant, "go wait for us there."

"Well, unless you count confirming that I'm really and truly not fixable as hurting, no. He was very courteous, very gentle." Astoria bit her lip and turned her face away from the young man watching her.

"You don't need fixing," Draco said in a low voice.

"Do," Astoria objected. "I'm broken. I've been erased."

"You aren't broken." Draco settled down in a chair and tugged her onto his lap. He wrapped his arms around her and tried to comfort her, tried to imagine what would even be comforting to the girl. What did you say to someone who'd lost all her memories? "You're brilliant and interesting and beautiful. So you don't remember - what did that old fool at school say – your sixth birthday present? Who cares. I certainly don't. You're still you, you're still mine, you're still everything you were before this happened. You'll just have to re-meet all your silly girlfriends when we go back but I'll watch out for you, and you'll graduate, and we'll get married, and everything will be fine."

"Everything's different now," she shook her head but settled back against him in the chair, soothed by his reassurance, soothed by the promise he wouldn't abandon her. She quite doubted he'd expected his week to end with a broken down fiancé added to his 'to do' list.

"Nothing important's different." He buried his face in her shoulder, smelled the sharp pine scent of the rosemary stuck in her hair.

"Don't tell me I knew about the Death Eaters and Riddle before."

"No," he said, drawing the word out with a sigh. "And I think you're in it now. The war is coming, and someone thought to use you, though for what I can't even begin to figure out. To control me, to report on me, to spy? We weren't even that close."

"Are we now?" she asked very quietly and he tightened his arms around her, a wordless answer. "Being drawn into the coming war, that seems like a pretty big thing that's different," she said. "Pretty important."

"Maybe," he conceded. "But I'm still here, Astoria. That's not changed."

"It has though," she said, turning to face him, twisting so she could see his face as he closed his eyes.

Draco sighed. "How do you know so much about me when you don't know _anything_? Is this some kind of magical girl thing?"

"Do you really want to go back to just talking about the color of my clothes?" She teased him, trying to imagine how incredible dull Astoria-before must have been.

"Hardly," he leaned his forehead in so it rested on hers.

"Then let's not. Things are different. They just are. And it's made us different, before we even knew who we were, really. Someone did this to me, did this to me _on purpose_. And Pomfrey knew, and Dumbledore knew, and they just patted me on the head instead of trying to help. And that Ginny girl… That's not… I can't just let people do that." She stopped talking for a while and he sat with her. There wasn't much to say; she was, after all, right. "I won't be anyone's pawn," she finally added in a low voice.

"How would you feel, however," a voice said from the doorway, and Draco and Astoria both looked up to see Riddle standing there, "about pretending to be a pawn?"


	4. Chapter 4

Lucius Malfoy escorted Draco and Astoria back to school, a trip none of them enjoyed. Lucius disliked Hogwarts in general, even when a trip there didn't make him late for breakfast. Draco dreaded the days to come, the battles he'd be fighting to protect the girl clinging to his hand. Astoria was simply afraid of the unknown.

"Miss Astoria," Lucius said as he left her in the main hall, as crowds of students gawked, "it was, as always, a pleasure to have you as a guest in our home. I look forward to the day it becomes your home as well."

Lucius was amused to see that she flushed at that courtesy; apparently the three hours she'd spent the night before trying to figure out how to blush on cue had been productive. Simple, dull Astoria, he mocked himself. That he'd fallen for her act, fallen for it for years, was rather galling. Still, if she'd fooled him, only dropping that mask because she couldn't remember it existed, she'd fool the Order.

"Draco," Lucius added, "I expect you to keep watch over the girl."

"Yes, sir," Draco said, a sullen undertone to his voice that brought smirks to the faces of some of the watchers. Idiots, Lucius Malfoy thought. As if Draco and he would ever display any true discord in front of an audience. With a brisk nod to the pair of newly fledged spies he left them, left the school.

Left the battleground.

When he returned to the Manor, breakfast was still being served and, after a light kiss to Narcissa's temple, he buttered a piece of toast as an elf brought him some fresh tea. They'd set up breakfast in a smaller dining room and the sun made the room seem inviting and cozy, especially after the scale of the hall at Hogwarts. Lucius loved his home, loved the way Narcissa had blended antique linens and flowering plants in this room to soothe the soul.

"Will they do," Bellatrix asked, leaning her head up against Tom Riddle at the table, a cup of tea in front of her, indulging in a display of public affection Lucius found distasteful in an adult. He wasn't sure why Riddle, so cold in so many ways, cossetted the woman.

"They'll be fine," he said. "Where's your husband, Bella?"

"Off being inept somewhere, I suppose," she said with a shrug. "Why, do you think he'd object?" She pulled her head off the man's shoulder and gestured towards Riddle with one hand.

"I think," Lucius said, considering her, "that he'd perfume you and walk you to the Dark Lord's chamber himself if he thought it would gain him favor."

"If the man wants favor he'll have to get it by being good at his job," Riddle snorted. "A standard he's yet to meet."

"He's dedicated to you," Bella appeased him, or tried to, running her hand down the man's shoulder and along his arm.

"I'd get a dog if I wanted mindless devotion," Riddle said, pushing back from the table and shrugging off her stroking hand. "I want to be Minister and that requires people with some actual wit on my team." He sighed, "All things in good time, though. First we have to get Dumbledore and that ridiculous boy taken care of."

"Do you actually believe in the prophecy?' Narcissa made a delicate frown, though whether at his possible belief in oracles or at some perceived imperfection in her bowl of fruit was not wholly clear. "I thought you believed soothsaying was nonsense."

"No, and it is." Riddle smiled at her. "But enough people believe in it, believe in _him_ , that until he's dead I'll constantly be fighting insurgent groups that rally behind him. He's worse than a bastard son, I swear. All the hassle after but none of the fun aforehand."

"Well," Lucius turned his eye to the practical matters at hand. "He's still warded, thanks to his mother, and until that warding drops there's not much we can do about him. The supposedly secret Order is still nattering about, making vague and most likely ridiculous plans in the meanwhile but Astoria and Draco are placed to forward those to us."

"I wonder if they could take down Dumbledore," Bella murmured. "They are in the school, and that's the tricky part."

"They probably could," Riddle conceded, "And Astoria, at least, certainly has the motivation, but the propaganda value of Voldemort taking down Dumbledore in some kind of public confrontation, only to then be vanquished in turn by Tom Riddle, hero of the realm, is much higher."

. . . . . . . . . .

Astoria clutched at Draco's hand as he led her back to their common room. "I'll do anything," she'd told Riddle, "as long as you don't take – "

"No one plans to take Draco from you," the man had interrupted her smoothly. "No one wants you to actually suffer, Astoria, and he'll watch out for you. Draco, my dear, is indispensable."

She'd watched him lean forward towards her, his eyes crinkling with sincerity and she'd made a face. "Still doesn't quite work," she'd said and he'd laughed.

"Would you believe I'm indifferent to whether you suffer but that I think Draco will increase your odds of success, that without him all your energy would go to simply trying to get through your days?"

"That," she'd said, "I'd believe."

Now, with Draco helping her through the entrance, making a show of being attentive and caring, she was a lot more afraid of meeting all these people than of Tom Riddle's scheme to have her find out Ginny's plans. "Here, love." He settled her onto a chair and leaned up against the side. The common room – her common room – was familiar, but it was as though it were a painting she'd seen, or a descriptive passage she'd read. She knew were all the chairs were, could have unerringly fetched extra quills from the cupboard. She just didn't remember ever having been here.

"You survived your weekend at home." A brown-haired girl eyed Draco with what looked like amusement. "And now you've returned to grace us with your presence again?"

"Stow it, Pansy," he muttered. "You remember Astoria. Astoria, this is Pansy. She's a childhood friend and general thorn in my side."

"Astoria and I know each other," the girl drawled, "What are you playing at, Draco?"

"Astoria," Draco said calmly, "has been the victim of an unfortunate memory curse and doesn't remember anyone."

Malicious pleasure spread across the girl's – across Pansy's – face. "So," she said, "you'd believe anything I told you?"

"Which would be why I'm right here," Draco said with false sweetness, "and why I'll be staying glued to her side. You might want to spread the word that I would consider any attack on Astoria an attack on me and respond accordingly."

"Touchy, touchy," Pansy laughed, but the meanness had left her face and she regarded Astoria with what looked like pity mixed with a certain amount of admiration. "So, you finally truly snared the boy, and all you had to do was lose your mind."

"I didn't do it on purpose," Astoria muttered and Pansy sighed. Astoria watched the woman assess her and didn't like the pity – the worry - she saw slowly grow in her eyes.

"I'll help you look after her, Draco," Pansy finally said, "but you owe me."

"Money or favors?"

"Favors," she said. "To be determined later."

"Deal," and Draco held his hand out and the two briskly shook.

"You fell hard, then," Pansy said.

"Beg pardon?" Draco turned from her to run his hands over Astoria's hair, fussing with strands that wouldn't lie straight.

"You just agreed to undetermined favors. That's not like you." She shook her head. "Ergo, you fell hard and are willing to pay what it takes to keep her from being ripped to shreds by all the little snakes she ruled last week."

"Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown," Draco muttered.

Pansy regarded Astoria. "Do you plan to try to seize that crown back or just plead illness and a need for recovery and let one of your little minions take your place?"

Astoria glanced at Draco. "I think," she said, thinking about Ginny and her agreement with Tom Riddle, "I'll abdicate. I think I'll have enough to deal with without trying to manage my 'minions'." She looked sad for a moment. "Don't I have any actual friends?"

Neither Draco nor Pansy graced that absurd question with an answer.

Pansy ran her tongue over her lips and squinted across the room at the cadre of girls not quite approaching them. "Abdication is probably a better choice. It's certainly easier for me if I want to keep you unhexed and mostly unharrassed. A little ritualistic display of weakness and, if you play them right, they'll demote you but look after you as well. Poor, broken little Astoria. Better that than having them actually turn on you. You'll have to endure some snippy little comments, I'm sure, but Draco's obvious partisanship will mostly keep that in check and I'll keep an eye on you in the girls' dorm."

"Is dormitory life always this… vicious?" Astoria asked quietly.

"Oh yes," Pansy smiled at her. "And, until you lost your marbles, you were the master player."

"Better than you?" Astoria regarded the other girl and Pansy began to laugh.

"So. You aren't totally defanged, huh? Good." She waved her hand at Draco. "Go away, pain in my arse. The other girls aren't going to come over until you're gone; you scare them. She'll be fine; let her get round one of the 'meet the people she already knows' things over with and then you can walk her to class."

. . . . . . . . . .

"Did you hear?" Ginny stops to listen to the gossip, bending down to tie her shoe. "That Astoria Greengrass - the one who's engaged to Draco Malfoy - she lost her whole memory, doesn't know a soul."

"No!" the other girl gasped in delight. "Does this mean he's available?"

"Hardly." The first girl snorted and rubbed her hands together, leaned over closer to her friend.

Ginny finished typing her shoe and starts rummaging in her bag. "He took her home over the weekend and his parents brought in some specialist to look at her and even though there's absolutely nothing that can be done for her he's standing by her. Hovering, even. Can you imagine? Engaged to a woman who doesn't remember him at all?"

"That's so romantic." The admission, however socially correct, sounded, to Ginny's ears, a bit sour. Apparently her little unwitting gossip source had a thing for Malfoy. She rolled her eyes as she straightened up. Honestly, sure, he was cute enough if you went for a man who spent all his time smirking and was probably already a Death Eater. Ginny didn't think his pretty face compensated for his general attitude problems but, clearly, not everyone shared her opinion.

Harry slipped up behind her and, grabbing her shoulders, spun her around for a quick kiss. "How's my favorite Weasley?"

She wrapped her arm around his waist and leaned into him. "Going my way?"

"I can be."

Ginny smiled and they started off down the cold, stone corridor. "I think," she said very quietly, "we might have a bit of a problem."

"Did Malfoy get the spell reversed?" A flicker of worry crossed Harry's face. "It's not like she could identify - "

"No, she's well and truly cursed. Malfoy Senior brought in a specialist; there's no hope."

"Then what's the problem?"

"Malfoy Junior." She paused and then added. "Dear Draco is not abandoning her to enjoy his parade of willing sex toys. If gossip's to be believed, he's, well, 'hovering' was the word his little fan used."

Harry groaned.

"And I already told her she didn't care for him." Ginny frowned. "Who knew he'd become such a chevalier. I wouldn't have thought he'd go for the distressed damsel. Okay, this is my class. Look, Harry, think about it. We can adapt but..."

"Maybe this is better," Harry murmured into her hair as he hugged her goodbye. "She'll be around him more, go to weekends at his house, be around the, you know. And she'll still believe you when you tell her she wanted away from that evil quagmire; more time spent with Malfoy Senior, who isn't even nice to her newly beloved Draco based on the way the two snakes glowered at one another this morning, can only make her like the whole lot of them less, make her more willing to spill the dirt. Hell, maybe we can suggest she could rescue the rotter from his family. Be all shocked and relieved he's standing by her, talk about hidden depths, all that good stuff. I mean, you'll be being honest. Who would have expected that from him?"

"Not me, that's for sure. I don't know, Harry. Maybe." Ginny shook her head and added one more thing before she went into class. "Talk to Hermione and Dumbledore, okay? See what they think."

. . . . . . . . . .

Astoria brushed up against Ginny on the way into dinner. "I don't remember which was our table in the library," she said, lacing her words with an embarrassed apology. "But if you'd like to study tonight…"

Ginny smiled and put her hand on the other girl's arm. "I'll find you there," she said. "Don't worry."

"Thanks," Astoria swallowed. "This is… hard. And it turns out that some of my former friends aren't, well, so nice."

"We've got your back, Tory, don't worry."

The two girls parted ways and went to their own tables. Ginny watched Astoria lean into Draco as though she were exhausted and he were the only thing keeping her upright. Hard to believe, Ginny thought to herself, that this was the same girl who last week had been the center of a social whirlwind.

She looked at Harry and he, glancing over at the fragile looking girl, mouthed "jackpot" to Ginny before laughing at a Quidditch anecdote and tossing a roll over to Ron.

. . . . . . . . . .

 _ **A/N – More of this weird little unfinished, not-outlined, oddity. I do like my unrepentant Death Eater Draco and my favorite version of Riddle as a totally amoral politician. (Creatures I find much scarier than snake faced monsters what with them actually existing and all.)**_


	5. Chapter 5

Draco looked down at her, worried. Astoria had survived the day well enough, neatly committing the names of scores of people she'd known just days earlier to memory. She'd done well in classes, or so she said. The _knowledge_ is all there, she'd said, I just can't remember when or how I got it. Professor Snape gave me some weird looks, she'd said.

We'll talk to him, Draco had said. Surely the teachers had been informed, right?

No, she'd said. In every class she'd had to reiterate her story. All personal memories gone, no one knows why. Lucius Malfoy had a specialist look at me this weekend, he confirmed what Madame Pomfrey said. There's no hope, the memories can't be restored.

Making her do that, Draco thought, had been cruel. He was quite sure that Potter, the Gryffindor golden boy, had never had to repeatedly explain his myriad injuries and mischances. More proof, if proof were needed, that this had been done to her and done by someone who wanted to beat her down as much as possible. After all, broken people are so much more susceptible to taking support where they can get it. Broken people can be manipulated. Broken people can be controlled.

It's what Dumbledore had done to Potter, after all. It was his style.

"Did you make contact with Ginny," he asked her, quietly rubbing her arms.

"What a bitch she is" Astoria muttered. "She could barely contain her glee I was so worn down."

"Well," Draco shrugged, "she was hardly alone in that today."

The halls had been filled with the rapid hiss of gossip spreading from one nasty little schoolgirl to another. Astoria had been too popular, too admired, too envied. Her own Slytherin minions were probably the least cruel as much as they reveled in her fall; whatever else happened, she was still one of theirs, still pureblooded, still engaged to Draco Malfoy, still set to become a powerful figure in their world. They were smart enough to keep themselves to subtle digs that even managed to be somewhat helpful as they filled her in on her background with assorted classmates. Girls from other houses were not so restrained. She'd been stared at, whispered about, laughed at. All through the day girls had pretended to know her, or not know her, or had asked her sly little questions. Male students had taken one look at Draco Malfoy and quietly steered clear of his progressively shakier fiancé. A very sweet first year boy had somehow decided it was his job to guard her in the common room and had sat at her side, doing his homework, glaring at his amused, but tolerant, housemates. Draco, however, wasn't going to turn down a protector who wasn't asking anything in return, even if that protector was all of eleven.

Now Astoria leaned against him, worn and sad, still stared at by her own housemates, still listening to murmurs she had to assume were about her, about them.

Draco decided he'd had enough.

"Come on," he said, tugging on her arm. "Let's go for a walk."

"To where," she said, dispiritedly. "To the library, to get stared at there? To shiver at the Astronomy tower? And I have to meet Ginny in an hour."

"Would you trust me," he said and, with a sigh, she stood up and followed him out into the hall, down a hall, around a corner, until he pushed open the door of an unused, and large, storage closet and settled her inside against a wall. "Voila," he said, shutting the door again, "privacy."

She looked around at the room; for an unused closet it was remarkably clean with no sign of dust or negligence. "Is this where you bring the half-bloods you 'tumble in broom closets' as your father put it?"

Draco almost choked. "He said _what_? In front of you?"

"When you were off owling my father he told Dumbldore you'd never take advantage of me even if you were tumbling half-bloods in closets. This seems…"

"Yes," Draco muttered, sitting next to her and wrapping an arm around her. "It was. But I'm not going to anymore."

Astoria pulled her feet up and rested her arms on her knees. "We really weren't that close, were we? Or is cheating on a fiancé a normal thing to do?"

Draco sighed. "It's pretty common in arranged marriages, at least before the actual wedding. Probably a lot after it too. Everyone expects the boy to..."

"But not the girl?"

He shook his head. "It's unfair, I know."

She snorted and looked around. "I think I can manage to contain my disappointment at not getting to screw boys in closets."

"Still," he admitted, "it is a double standard." He tightened his grip on her. "And I'm done with it, I swear."

She leaned her weight against him. "I hate this," she murmured. "I wish we could just go back to your home and hide away there."

"You're not even mad?" Draco looked at her, trying to understand this girl – this woman, really. Suffering a curse turned out to be a rather rapidly maturing experience.

"That you cheated on a woman I don't even know?" Astoria sighed. "I guess I should be but… if you did it now I'd…"

"I won't," he said again. "Astoria, I… I'm so sorry this happened to you. I'd do anything to make it better but…"

She turned to him, lifted her hand to brush against his face. "You're doing a lot," she whispered. "Draco, I – ." She stopped and looked at him, this pointy faced blond boy who'd transformed from a stranger in a hallway, quite literally the first person she remembered knowing in her life, to a lifeline, to a friend. I'm going to marry this boy, she thought to herself. Riddle's going to win this war, and I'm going to graduate, and marry this boy and live in that lovely house and he's going to take care of me forever. When he'd first told her they were engaged she'd been horrified, horrified he was clearly telling her the whole truth, that he was shocked she didn't remember. Now, just a few days later, the idea that she'd be bound to this person forever seemed reassuring, comforting. He was so… good.

Okay, she thought to herself, he's not exactly _good_. He lied almost as well as Riddle, he was a soldier in a war she didn't quite understand yet, he traded favors and obligations with the ease of long practice. She could see that some people were afraid of him. But he had utterly and without the slightest hesitation championed her. She could see how many girls had hoped her cursed state would end their engagement, would make Draco Malfoy available for the plucking.

She could tell that Ginny person had assumed he would, was put out he hadn't.

I could love this boy, she thought. I probably will before this is all over.

Thinking that, she leaned forward and brushed her lips against his, wondering if they'd ever kissed before, wishing she could remember. With a sudden sound, somewhere between a groan and a whimper, he pulled her onto him and then had his hands on either side of her face. His lips moved over hers, his hands slid into her hair and, hesitantly, she parted her lips and let him, just barely, slip his tongue between them.

She wondered if this were their first kiss.

She pulled back a bit, looked at him with doubt in her eyes and he pulled his hands away, brushed some hair back from her cheek. "You are so beautiful," he whispered, and then laughed when she shook her head. "You are," he repeated, rubbing a thumb over her cheek. "I love this hair, the way it has just the tiniest little stubborn wave to it and won't quite behave. Just… all of you." He sighed and looked at her. "I'm not good at the flowery stuff. Just… you are."

She smiled at him, then, a sad little smile, more wan than happy, and he watched tears prick at the corner of her dark eyes. "What's this?" he muttered, "Why are you about to cry? What did I say wrong?"

"Nothing," she looked down and her hair fell into her face. "It's just… I hate not remembering. I mean, when did we first dance together, when was our first kiss, when – "

"Our first dance," he said softly, "was at our engagement party and I stepped on your feet and you told me I needed a better dancing master." She glanced up at him and he pushed her hair back behind her ears, tucking a strand away very carefully. "Our first kiss, unless you count perfectly appropriate pecks on your cheek or the back of your hand, was just now."

"Really?"

"Really." He put his hands back on her face, ran his thumb over her lips. "And unless you'd very much object I'd rather like to have our second."

"I… no, I don't object." And then her mouth was on his again and this time she let herself sink into him as he moved his hands down her back and she thought that this might be _their_ second kiss but it most certainly wasn't his, that he seemed to know what he was doing, know how to make her melt at his touch. She felt embarrassed by her own inexperience, by how awkward she felt. I don't know what to _do_ , she thought to herself as he began kissing along her jaw line and down her neck.

Then he had stopped and, breathing heavily, said, "I think we need to stop. I need to stop. Unless you want some other firsts in a broom closet."

Astoria began to blush; she could feel the red creeping up her neck and then rising over her face as she stared at him. Swallowing hard, she muttered, "No, that's okay."

He began to pat at her hair, trying to smooth it back into something resembling tidiness. "I'm sorry," he said, "you look... ravished. All mussed and… I don't think anyone's going to believe we were in here talking."

She shrugged. "Good." She looked at him and smiled. He looked pretty rumpled too; his hair was all disheveled and his mouth was swollen and his eyes… she liked the way his eyes looked. She could do with seeing him look at that way again.

Now he laughed. "Really? You want our little extracurricular activity public? Why."

"Because it marks you as mine," she said, running her own thumb over his swollen lips. "Because all those bitches thought you'd leave me, abandon broken little Astoria. They looked at me today and were just waiting for the news that you were going to break off the engagement."

"I'm no breaking anything," Draco said, "and you aren't broken." He watched her smirk back at him.

"No." She said. "I'm not."

. . . . . . . . . .

Astoria brushed her hair back into a neat ponytail before she met Ginny at the library. She walked down the halls towards the meeting with Draco at her side, his hands thrust casually into his pockets. At the door Ginny watched as he brushed his lips across Astoria's cheek, a cool, unconcerned gesture that made the ginger girl huff out an exasperated breath. That _wasn't_ supposed to have happened and she didn't quite agree with Harry's optimistic suggestion that this would somehow work in their favor. The girl was supposed to have been left with no protectors, no one to lean on except them. Harry's silver lining, Ginny thought, was probably more of a daft hope than a blessing in disguise.

"I'll wait up," he said and Astoria smiled at him, a look so intimate Ginny suddenly wondered if they'd been a lot closer before the little memory curse than anyone had known. Not that she'd remember but he certainly would. Maybe that explained his baffling partisanship.

Or maybe he was just taking advantage of her too. That seemed more in character.

"Tory," Ginny waved her hand and the girl hurried over towards her, her own head tucked back down against her chest now that Draco had sauntered back towards their dungeon common room. "How are you holding up?"

The girl pulled out a chair and slumped down into it, dropping her bag of books at her feet and not even making a token gesture towards taking one out. "Well," she said, "other than a rather charming eleven year old boy who might have a crush on me it turns out I have no friends in my house. That's been a bit of a unpleasant revelation." Her voice had the bitter lightness you hear in people trying not to cry and Ginny made her best concerned face.

"I'm sorry," she murmured.

"I mean," Astoria continued, "if you had a friend who broke her leg would you show up at her bedside and taunt her with all the things she couldn't do anymore?"

Ginny shook her head and began, "I'm so sorry. I can't say I'm surprised, but…"

"And it's worse than a broken leg," Astoria just kept talking. "It's not going to get better. Not ever. I was just born in the hallway, talking to Draco. There's nothing before that, nothing. And there never will be again."

"Is no one helping you in your house," Ginny asked, reaching out to pat the other girl's hand. "No one?"

"Well, Pansy," Astoria snorted, "but Draco's paying her. It's not exactly out of the kindness of her heart."

At that Ginny snorted too. "I don't think Pansy Parkinson has a heart, so I think you're right about that."

"You're my best friend," Astoria said with what sounded like utter frustration, "and I don't even remember you. But you're one of the only people I've talked to who hasn't tried to play some kind of snippy trick on me so I guess that makes you best by default."

Ginny hid her smile and said, "Well, it looked like Draco was being nice?" She tipped the tone up into a question and Astoria, oh so obligingly, filled her in.

"Yeah," she smiled, "he's been really great. I think his father, for all he's been nothing but courteous, pushed him to break off the engagement but he's been… just good and true."

Good and true. Ginny snorted to herself. If you could come up with two words less likely to describe Draco Malfoy she'd love to hear them. Still, it was good news that Lucius and company – evil bastards that they were – were helping her out. Honestly, she'd thought Draco would want to spurn the sudden social liability of a brainless fiancé and his parents would insist he honor the contract but she'll take the inverse. The inverse is just fine. All of them repudiating the brainless socialite would have left their plan with nothing.

Still, patience. The girl is almost shaking in front of her. If she pushed her too hard tonight she'd just alienate her. "Do you want to go down to Hogsmeade with Harry and me this weekend? I mean, assuming you're not going with Draco? We can ditch Harry with the Quidditch magazines and go clothes shopping."

"That sounds great," Astoria said.

"So," Ginny said, pulling a book out of her own bag, "how many essays did you get stuck with your first day back?"

Astoria rolled her eyes. "Way too many. You'd think inches were the newest cure for memory loss."

Both girls laughed as they began writing.

. . . . . . . . . .

"I got trapped into agreeing to go shopping with her," Astoria said and Draco laughed as he handed her the cocoa he'd coaxed out of an accommodating elf. That the cocoa was for 'Miss Toria' who 'couldn't remember' had been the final argument in his favor and now the elf had hung around long enough to make sure he hadn't been lying before winking out of existence, back, he supposed, to the kitchens.

Apparently the elves liked Astoria.

"It could be worse," he said. "I mean, you _are_ trying to get her to reveal her dastardly plot. Maybe she'll tell you over shoes or whatever it is girls talk about in groups."

"No," Astoria corrected, "I'm slipping her false information at the request of a man who might well be psychotic. Her plot is transparent; strip me of my memories, make me believe she's my friend, turn me against you and yours so I'll turn spy. And I don't know what girls talk about in groups, thanks for reminding me."

"You," Pansy joined them, sitting cross-legged on the floor by the fire. "Where's mine?" She eyed the cocoa and Draco snorted.

"Go befriend the elves yourself."

"Huh?" Astoria looked at her.

"Right now what they talk about is you," Pansy repeated. "Are you faking, is Draco going to leave you, were you having sex with him in that closet he takes girls to tonight. Things like that."

"No, no, and no," Astoria said, sipping her cocoa and making a face. "How many girls _have_ you taken there?"

"Not me, before you ask," Pansy said. "The idea is gross."

"Like kissing your sister," Draco agreed.

"Ginny?" Astoria needled and Pansy laughed.

"I like this version of Astoria so much more, Draco. Your old fiancé would have pretended to have no idea you were screwing girls in that closet." Pansy narrowed her eyes. "In fact, you aren't nearly as stupid as I thought."

Astoria wiped whipped cream from her mouth. "Don't tell." Then, slanting a grin sideways at Pansy. "He hasn't answered about Ginny."

"That's because I'm trying to keep my dinner down." He made an exaggerated grimace. "Life of celibacy, first, love, life of celibacy.."

"And, lucky me, I get to go shopping with her."

"That's gross," Pansy said. "Do you plan to braid each other's hair too? Paint each other's toenails?"

"Those are good ideas," Astoria said, swallowing more chocolate. "Ginny's my new bestest of best friends."

Pansy narrowed her eyes and, when Draco muttered, "politics," nodded slowly. "Better you than me," she said. "I don't know if I could be nice to the little blood traitor, even…"

But Draco shook his head and she closed her mouth.

. . . . . . . . . .

 **A/N – More of my little drastoria. I think I'm coming around to drastoria.**


	6. Chapter 6

"Miss Greengrass, please stay after class."

Astoria stopped putting her things back in her bag and looked up at Professor Snape trying to figure out what the man wanted. She was fairly sure her work had been accurate, she'd followed the instructions and … oh, why bother trying to figure out what the man wanted. She sank down with a sullen frown into her seat; she was supposed to meet Draco after this class and she'd been looking forward to a quick hug, to leaning on him for a moment. Now she was going to miss that because this git professor wanted to ask her something. Just… great.

The day had started with having to endure Ginny's forced cheer at breakfast. She'd been invited to eat with the Gryffindors and she'd felt obliged to agree because, after all, Ginny was her best friend. Bestest of best friends. The situation was, as Pansy said, gross, and it had been miserable. She'd gotten to meet Ginny's brother and spent the meal contemplating whether he'd just never learned table manners or simply didn't care to use them. He'd also given her a frankly appreciative leer and she'd had to resist the urge to point to her eyes and suggest he look there; that might not have fit into her 'broken Astoria, leaning on Ginny' image.

She hoped Riddle would kill him in this war that was coming up. She'd decided to suggest to the man that if his plan resulted in her having to eat with these people on a regular basis he would owe her a favor and that she knew what she wanted.

She had a feeling he wouldn't especially object.

Actually, she had a feeling he would be charmed.

As the last of her classmates fled the lab, rats deserting the ship that was her, she slouched still lower in her seat and waited for the potions master to explain what he wanted. He watched them all leave and then, picking up her potion sample in one hand, he looked first at it, then at her. "Would you mind explaining this, Miss Greengrass?"

"I… what?" She looked at him. She'd bloody well done it right, what was his problem?

"This absolutely perfect sample? Would you mind explaining how you did this?" Professor Snape, poorly washed, looming at her in his grim attired, seemed to think he could intimidate her, though into what was a bit of a mystery.

Astoria narrowed her eyes and controlled the urge to make a face. "I followed the instructions. Was that wrong of me?" She couldn't quite keep the sarcasm out of her voice.

"I'd accuse you of cheating, but as no one near you managed to be even marginally competent I am forced, almost against my will, to conclude you actually did this yourself." Professor Snape set the sample back down and sneered at her. "Which is astonishing as you've never been a particularly good student before, quite the opposite, and so I find myself curious as to when a brain grew inside that pretty head of yours."

"Maybe there's room for things as boring as potions now that I don't remember anything useful," she said, no longer bothering to control her glare. This was unbelievable; she was being dressed down for doing the damn assignment correctly.

"Yes, well, while I'm sure it's devastating to you to no longer recall who wore what dress to which party last year, I find it doubtful your recent run in with a memory curse explains your sudden academic improvement." The man frowned at her. "The first logical assumption one might leap to is that you've been playing dumb for years."

"Why would I do that?" Astoria started to gather up her bag, wondering whether the man was right; had she really played that stupid? Of course, if doing school work right regularly resulted in interrogations like this, well, she'd stop making that mistake. Who cared about her wretched grades? "Can I go?"

"No." He was looking at the samples on his desk. They ranged in color from the pine green of hers to a rather lurid pink; several were beginning to separate. "What troubles me about that hypothesis, however, is that I can't quite figure out what benefit you would get from pretending to be an idiot. Most girls, or so I have learned over my unfortunate years teaching them, play dumb to attract male attention. But you, Miss Greengrass, you have never needed to attract boys because your parents so very thoughtfully sold you to the pick of the pureblood litter, as it were, before you were old enough to know to object."

"I like Draco very much," she said, teeth gritted.

"You didn't last week," he observed. "Or, rather, you treated him with the contempt of familiarity and security. Perhaps that qualifies as 'liking' for you. I wouldn't know. That, however is not my point. My _point_ , Miss Greengrass, is that the girl who sat in this room last week would never have turned in a perfect potion and I find the shift in your abilities puzzling. A bit of a riddle, one might say, and I've always been good at riddles so I'm sure I'll solve it."

She huffed out an exasperated breath. "Great. Well, if you figure it out let me know since I'm pretty much stuck knowing nothing about myself. Can I go _now_?"

"Certainly." And he turned away from her as she snatched up her bag and stomped out the room cursing any interfering professor who wasted her time, kept her away from Draco, so he could blather at her about doing her work too well, as if being good at his class was somehow a problem he had to solve. A riddle, of all things.

. . . . . . . . . .

"You wanted to talk to me about Draco's potion's marks?" Lucius stood in the doorway and Severus Snape looked up

"Indeed, and thank you for coming so promptly," Snape smiled and rose to greet his, well, 'friend' might be a bit much. His colleague. Lucius shut the door behind him and strode across the room, radiating his endlessly irritating confidence and privilege. Snape had spent years watching, failing to successfully mimic, and resenting Lucius Malfoy's ease and air of power. It would figure that when he, Severus Snape, had finally joined a club there was Malfoy, already there, ahead of him again.

It puzzled him that the man seemed to genuinely like his company, had asked him to be godfather to his only son, of all things. It was a bit as if Astoria Greengrass had decided she quite liked the Bulstrode girl, and even total memory loss hadn't been enough to make that happen. It made him suspicious.

Snape, as his therapist liked to point out, had trust issues.

Still, he had a lurking suspicion Lucius would want to know – _other people_ would want to know – about Astoria Greengrasses sudden marked academic improvement. And keeping _other people_ happy was in his own best interest. He was also a bit miffed Dumbledore hadn't let him know about this. He would have argued, rather vehemently, against any plan that involved this kind of memory curse. It was unethical and, Snape thought, maybe it would be nice if the good guys could act like such instead of like a frustrating mixture of entitled, incompetent and scheming.

"This," Snape held up the potion vial, "is a perfect potion."

Lucius raised his eyebrows, an expression Snape often saw on Draco's face and he thought, idly, about how similar the two men were. The apple hadn't fallen far from that tree. "This is a problem?"

"It is when the brewer was Astoria Greengrass, a girl who, until her little accident, only occasionally flirted with sidling up to competent. It is when this potion is supposed to be too difficult for the bulk of the students, when it's one of the ones I use to suss out which students have an actual talent for brewing beyond following step-by-step instructions." He sighed and sat down again. "She shouldn't have been able to do it. Either she faked dumb for years – and faked it quite skillfully – or she got smarter when she got cursed."

"Did you ask her about it?" Lucius swirled his robe out of the way and settled into a student's seat.

Snape snorted. "Of course I did. She was sullen and adolescent at me."

"You don't know how to handle her," Lucius observed. "She's never been anything but gracious to me."

"I generally try not to handle the teenage girls," Snape said and Lucius laughed. "They're horrible creatures," he added and Lucius laughed again.

"I do think she's been playing dumb for years," the blond man said. "But I'll ask around whether memory curses of this magnitude can have surprising side effects." He paused then asked, "How did Draco do with that potion? Since I am, of course, here to ask about his marks."

Snape snorted with derision. "You don't think I recall every child's potions after the year is done, do you?" He looked at Lucius and finally said, "but he wouldn't have been accepted into the advanced class if he hadn't done it correctly."

. . . . . . . .

"Fascinating." Tom Riddle considered the increasingly interesting puzzle that was Astoria Greengrass. "The obvious answer, of course, is that she hid her abilities but that doesn't feel quite right, or not wholly right."

"I've told you for years, Lucius, that that girl was clever," Narcissa murmured from where she had draped herself on a settee.

"Still," her husband replied, "there's 'clever' and there's able to successfully both impress and confound Severus."

"He's bad with women," Narcissa dismissed Lucius' objection. "I mean, he's still carrying a torch for that Lily woman and not only has she been dead for years, they were totally estranged by the time she died."

"Did I know her?" Riddle asked, not really especially interested.

"You killed her, Tom," Narcissa said, rolling her eyes.

He shrugged. "I kill a lot of people."

"What I'm trying to point out to you gentlemen," Narcissa said, "though not with any apparent success, is that you can't rely on Severus' judgment when it comes to women. He's overly dramatic."

"You can't rely on Severus for much of anything, for that matter," Lucius added. "Given that he's still carrying a wee bit of a grudge about how you killed his perfect Lily."

"She was the Potter woman?" Tom Riddle was still trying to remember Lily.

"That's the one," Lucius said with some exasperation. Honestly, when you couldn't even remember all the women you'd killed you might have a problem. "Harry Potter's mother."

"She was quite the witch," Riddle mused, remembering the ginger termagant he'd struck down, along with her interfering husband. "That ward she cast on her son as she died was impressive."

"You would have simplified a lot of things if you hadn't bungled murdering the baby," Narcissa said with a sniff. "Severus wouldn't be playing spy for Dumbledore, no one would be planning on turning that boy into a figurehead. It was sloppy of you, Tom, and put your plans back by the seventeen years of that oh-so-impressive ward."

Tom Riddle turned to her from where he was seated by the window and grimaced. He hated being reminded of that particular failure. The Potter boy, and the absurd prophecy around him, was a thorn in his side. If no one knew Voldemort and he were one and the same it wouldn't matter, and if the boy were dead it wouldn't matter, but just enough people, people like that meddling Dumbledore, knew about both his other self and the prophecy. Those people all needed to be quietly – or not so quietly – eliminated. As did that boy and any of his especially devoted sidekicks.

Voldemort, Riddle admitted to himself, had been a bad idea but now he was stuck with it, had to kill his own alter ego off before he could really grab that brass ring of total power. And Voldemort would, of course, be handy for getting rid of all those pesky do-gooders.

It was as if people thought that just because he had no respect for human life whatsoever he'd make a bad Minister, which Tom found to be absurd. He made a mental note to ensure that a more through study of history was added to the Hogwarts curriculum once he was in power. Amoral men often made quite successful leaders and he was sure he could lead Britain back to a time of world domination. And it wasn't like he was a ravening lunatic. He carefully checked the economic costs and benefits of every murder. Given the vast number of irritating people who continued to live because he couldn't justify killing them he felt that his reputation as evil was overblown.

"Nevertheless," Lucius gave his wife a quelling look, "the issue at hand is Astoria."

Tom Riddle frowned, brought back to the question of the cause of Astoria's sudden improvement in potions. He wouldn't normally spare a second thought for the socialite wives of his followers, much less the underage budding socialite fiancés, but this one was not only the keystone in one of Dumbledore's plots, she was also clever and perceptive. He glanced at Narcissa and wondered if clever and perceptive Astoria had the potential to be even half the viper the languid woman across the room was; if so, she'd be a valuable asset indeed. People underestimated these fragile looking beauties at their own peril. "I wonder if we could pull her records, get a good sense of how she was doing before the curse, then just ask her to demonstrate her current prowess. I'm not sure it really matters but I find myself intrigued. Just how good is she, I wonder."

It was unfortunate she'd unwittingly tipped her hand, he supposed. A girl devoted to him – or devoted to Draco which was close enough for government work, as the saying went – who was significantly more powerful than people suspected would be a nice tool to have. Maybe it wasn't completely too late. Tom Riddle frowned. "Lucius, would you suggest to her that she play dumb a little longer?"

Lucius was nodding in response to his comment about the girl's files. "I'll have her father request copies of old assessments and then forward them to me. We can have her and Draco home next weekend, or maybe the one after. Surely no one would object to the idea that the child needs time to recuperate away from the stressors of that place." He paused. "And I'll have Draco warn her to pull back a bit for now."

Narcissa tipped her head back and sighed. "They'll be delighted to ship her off to us, love. They think she's going to spy for them; hard for her to do that from her dorm room."

. . . . . . . . . .

Draco read the note and grinned before handing it over to Astoria as they cuddled next to the fire in their common room. "Survive the trip to Hogsmeade with your new chum – chums - and you'll get to enjoy the rest of the weekend at the Manor."

She must, he thought, have been made happy by that idea because she flung herself at him and hugged him until he thought she might be trying to strangle him. She was so tightly wound since her accident, so constantly on edge, that he felt he owed it to her to make her feel more at ease whenever he could. More, he was learning to love making her happy; when he coaxed a smile onto her face he felt... amazing.

"If I could go to the Manor every weekend, I would," she admitted, one of those smiles tweaking her lips up as she let him go and leaned her head up against him. "At least there no one stares at my chest like it's some kind of reward they've been promised for a job well done."

He stiffened at that. "Who does that? Not Crabbe, I hope, or Goyle. I'll kill them, Astoria, kill them in pieces if they look at you like that."

She snorted at that, though, and he relaxed, even if only marginally. "They look at me like they're afraid you'll hurt them if I get so much as a bruise on their watch. Which is creepy enough, but, no, it's that Ron boy, Ginny's brother. It's like he thinks when this is all over I'll somehow end up, I don't know, grateful for – "

"That fucking bastard," Draco hissed. "That filthy little blood traitor should know better than to – "

"Stop." She put her hand over his mouth. "It's never going to happen." Draco was still glowering and she looked at his expression and added, "I've decided to ask one of your family friends for a little favor; I think he owes me after asking me to befriend those people, don't you?"

Draco began to smile and brushed his lips over her temple, then down her jaw line. "I think I begin to understand why my mother has liked you so very much all these years."

. . . . . . . . . .

 _ **A/N – Tom Riddle making references to The Princess Bride. It had to happen. I'm sorry.**_


	7. Chapter 7

"I think I really dislike that girl," Astoria groused as they walked up the path to the Manor. She ripped a piece of the bread she'd pocketed and tossed it to one of the peacocks who gave her a look of vastly injured dignity before deigning to grab the offering.

"Ginny," Draco asked as he glared at the peacock who, having decided the girl as his side was a soft touch was now getting too close.

"Well, that Ginny girl is no prize either," Astoria muttered, "But I was thinking of Hermione Granger."

"They took Granger along with them too?" Draco made a face. "As if blood traitors weren't bad enough? Ugg. I'm sorry."

"That hair," Astoria shook her own is mocking disapproval. "If I have to be best friends with them all do you think I could get her to do something about it?"

"Probably not," Draco said. "She's much too superior to care about things as trivial as appearances. She wants to be judged by how very clever she is."

"She certainly judged me by how clever she thought I was. Or wasn't."

"She's a bitch," Draco pulled Astoria in for a hug on the steps. "And within a few years she'll probably be either a dead bitch or one working some dreary job where everyone hates her and finds excuses not to go to her meetings. 'Oh, gosh, Granger, I really meant to go to your thing about how we all need to be more considerate about the group lunch area but I had to rearrange my files.'" Astoria giggled at his vicious mimicry and he brushed his thumb across the smile he'd brought to her face. "Welcome back home, love."

"Indeed," Narcissa stood in the door. "Don't mock the Muggle-born, Draco. It's tasteless. Though I am sorry you have to socialize with her, Astoria dear. We all make sacrifices for the cause."

"How much did you hear, mother?" Draco bowed over her hand with absolute correctness and she smiled and him and brushed a lock of hair out of his face.

"Enough." She turned to Astoria and gestured the girl into the Manor. "Draco is right about one thing, however. Welcome home, dear girl. I've arranged a simple weekend with no guests to plague you and no plans or places to go. Riddle wants to get a sense of how your abilities have changed since your accident but other than that you can just walk the grounds and enjoy time with Draco without having to be on your guard or worry about people like that Granger girl."

"That sounds lovely," Astoria smiled and she and Narcissa assessed one another.

After a moment the older woman smiled back. "You seem to be more yourself." She brushed her lips over Astoria's cheek then looked back at her son. "I've had the elves prepare your rooms for you. Riddle's waiting for her in the library. Would you be so kind as to escort her there and then meet your father and I in the solarium?"

Draco nodded and with a worried frown at Astoria, led her down the hall, handed her off to the man he knew was as close to evil as he was ever likely to meet.

. . . . . . . . . .

"Draco doesn't care for you," Astoria announced after the door had closed. "He seems to think you're going to hurt me."

Tom Riddle looked up from the folder her was perusing. "I'm curious how he'd plan to stop me if I did."

"That," said Astoria, "is the kind of thing that makes people terrified of you." She stood with her arms crossed and tapped her foot impatiently. "If you want to rule the world you'll do better if people think you're charming than if they think you're about to rip their hearts out and devour them."

Tom Riddle, Lord Voldemort, laughed at the teenage girl tapping her foot at him and rose from his seat. "Ah, I've missed you. You and Narcissa are the only ones willing to stand up to me and Lucius, rather like Draco I suspect, pales every time she does it."

Astoria pouted and tossed her hair and Riddle laughed again at her flawless portrayal of an utterly vapid adolescent. "Now that you're done scolding me, I have some curiosity I'm going to insist you indulge." He held out his hand and she crossed the room and took it. "Your grades, my dear, have been terrible. Your teachers wrote notes about how you were 'barely adequate'."

"You've hauled me in here to discuss my grades," Astoria actually goggled at him. "Don't you have better things to do? Murders to plan, I've overheard you might have a second identity to frame?"

"Eavesdroppers come to a bad end, my dear," Tom said, smiling first at her discovery of his plans and then at her dramatic eye roll. "Unlike your idiot professors," he continued, "unlike even Snape who's quite brilliant if a bit single-minded and bad with people – I had the good fortune of meeting you for the first time when you weren't hiding your mind but were rather quite keen on figuring out how to fill it up again. After your little potions demonstration I find myself wondering how large _is_ the gap between your documented abilities and your actual skills."

Astoria managed, albeit barely, to conceal her snort of derision that Riddle described anyone else as 'bad with people'. She stuck with the point of his whole speech that stood out to her. "Professor Snape complained to _you_ I did too well in his class?"

"Not quite," Riddle turned and was gathering some objects from the floor behind him. "He spoke to Lucius."

"You think to make me a weapon" Astoria said, narrowing her eyes.

"I've already made you into a weapon," he corrected. "Information, and misinformation, can be as deadly as a curse. No, I'm interested in just how keen your edge is. However limited your usefulness is now, well, you won't be a student forever." He lay the objects out in front of her and said, "I'd like you to transfigure each of these into the most complex thing you can."

He stopped her after the first one, when she had, without even furrowing her brow, turned a thimble into a miniature dragon that belched fire. "Inanimate to animate, plus elemental? Very nice." He banished the miniature dragon, however, and said, "Though if we singe the carpet Narcissa might be annoyed."

While he was talking she's turned the second item, yesterday's paper, into a potted rosebush that unfurled petals and began to bloom before his eyes. This time she was watching him, a faintly smug expression on her face.

"You don't remember learning that?" he queried and she shrugged. "And yet the skill is there."

"Obviously," she said. "Are we done?"

"No," he said. "Defend yourself," and launched a quick, fairly harmless, curse at her. She blocked it and tossed back a sadly lackluster student hex.

"So," he said, "You can brew and transform but you can't actually attack anyone. I'll have Bella tutor you; she's quite good at the Dark Arts and sometimes has some rather interesting insights."

"Fine," Astoria shoved her wand back into her pocket. "I have a favor to ask you."

Riddle cocked his head to the side and listened to her. Draco, hovering in the hall outside instead of meeting with his parents, waiting for Astoria to be released back to his care, was startled to hear a loud, warm laugh from Tom Riddle fill the air as the man opened the library door and shooed Astoria out.

"You are as fortunate as your father," the man said to him, somewhat obliquely Draco thought, before shutting himself back into the library alone.

. . . . . . . . . .

"I think I really dislike that girl," Ginny groused as she sat with Harry in their common room.

Hermione shrugged without looking up from her book. "She didn't seem that bad to me. A little vapid, maybe. Shallow. I don't think you're going to get anything of value from her, though, unless Narcissa Malfoy's seating charts for her dinner parties have some kind of huge strategic value."

"Catty," Ginny said with a grin.

"I still think this was a stupid plan." Hermione put the book down. "Does anyone really think Voldemort sits down with Draco Malfoy's brain dead fiancé and discusses his dastardly plans with her? I'm sure she knows exactly how many starters you need for any size gathering and what the best brands of fire whiskey are but where the next Death Eater attack will be?" She snorted and picked the book up again.

"I rather liked her," Ron said.

"You like her chest," Hermione said. "And she's not amused by that. If you plan to have any hope of getting her to pay attention to her – though why you'd want Draco Malfoy's leavings I have no idea – you'll have to look at her eyes."

Ron shrugged. "After we win and Malfoy is dead or disgraced, and she's dragged down with him, she might not be so fussy. The guy on the winning side might start to seem like a good bet."

"Have you always been this gross, Ron?" Ginny demanded and he shrugged again.

"She's a Death Eater's fiancé and you expect me to give that much of a shit about her feelings? Before you lot wiped her brain out and made her think Ginny was her only friend, she wouldn't have spit on any of us."

"Still," Ginny wrinkled her nose and made a gagging sound. "Do you have to make it so obvious you're disgusting?"

"Fine, I'll stop staring at her tits." He threw his hands up. "I'll even pretend she's not a fucking loathsome snake who's got her future all knotted up with the king snake, if you want."

"Your graciousness is an inspiration to us all," muttered Hermione.

Ginny groaned and buried her face in her hands. "Does the girl have to be so boring? She didn't want to do _anything_ and she has nothing to talk about, of course. I should get hazard pay for this."

"I don't think you get hazard pay for tasks that are especially tedious," Harry grinned at her. "And, besides, you did find out she's off to the Manor tonight and that she'll be there all weekend and that she finds Malfoy's parents intimidating and not especially nice to her and that she sits at the table without speaking and they all just talk over her as if she were a potted plant."

"That doesn't seem surprising," Hermione still hadn't looked up. "We had to struggle to get her to talk and we have ulterior motives; I doubt the Malfoys bother. Hell, they probably like that she's so placid. Potted plant seems like a pretty good description."

"Just get her to tell you what they talk about at these things and the Order'll be happy," Harry soothed his girlfriend. "I'm sure 90% of it will be worthless but even one or two good tips would be helpful."

. . . . . . . . . .

Bella eyed her nephew's fiancé with a barely repressed sigh. Unlike Lucius she'd never believed the girl was an idiot; no one who could handle dormitory politics in Slytherin as well as she had could be anything less than very clever indeed. She just hadn't cared to waste any time thinking about Draco's future wife, a woman who would surely, like all the other little Death Eater wives, throw lovely parties where powerful men made not wholly ethical deals. Only the Black sisters – only she and Cissa – had ever moved into Riddle's inner circle.

He was a bit patriarchal, if truth be told.

And now, patriarchal, cold-blooded Riddle wanted her to train this girl – this literally empty headed girl – in combat. "Tell me what you think of her," he'd said obliquely. "Of her power."

He'd tossed a pile of boring school reports at her, reports she'd dutifully read. Well, skimmed. She'd dutifully skimmed them and found, not at all to her surprise, that Astoria was an indifferent student. She wasn't bad enough to require remedial help, but no one expected a stellar showing on her O.W.L.s this spring. One teacher had been so tactless as to note that it was a good thing she'd never need to work for a living.

Sometimes Bella wondered if these people had ever _met_ her sister. Cissa would no more have allowed an engagement between her precious son and an idiot to stand than she would have tolerated mismatched drapes or servants putting out the wrong dessert plates at a party. Of course, people tended to dismiss Cissa as a brainless society hostess; it was one way she'd managed to kill quite so many people for Riddle.

Still, you'd think history would have taught people not to underestimate the Blacks. Lethal, all of us, Bella though with pleasure as she tossed the Greengrass girl a book.

" _Spelles Moste Fowle_?" The girl read the title and looked at her. "You plan to instruct me in keeping chickens."

"Mouthy chit," Bella said, amused against her will. "Read it but don't try any of the incantations until I can work on them with you."

"I suppose I shouldn't mention this to dear Ginevra," Astoria asked, tilting her head to the side.

Bella laughed. "What does Riddle have you telling her this week?"

"Oh, that there's a mysterious guest at Malfoy Manor that I haven't seen."

"So he's letting them know he's here?"

"Apparently." Astoria shrugged. "He doesn't tell me _why_ he wants information passed along, only what I'm to spill as we look at fashion magazines and giggle about boys."

"You actually giggle with Ginevra Weasley?" Bella stuck her tongue out and made a face and now it was Astoria's turn to laugh.

"Ginny would like to shuck her pureblood ways and consummate her little liaison with the Chosen One but Harry Potter has performance problems. Or so she tells me." Astoria shrugged. "I'm lying to her with every word out of my mouth and she's lying to me and I, simpleton that I am, believe everything she says. I giggle and sympathize and pout that Draco has no interest in me 'that way'."

"Does she ever tell the truth," Bella asked, curiosity getting the best of her.

"She really doesn't like Draco," Astoria said. "She truly though he'd try to abandon me after my little cursing problem and that his parents would make him see the engagement through, that he'd resent them, and me, and be cruel and that she could use that to turn me against him more easily."

Bella snorted, an unladylike sound that would have made her mother shudder and beat her. "I thought the girl was a pureblood. Did she really think Draco would set you aside?"

"I don't think the Weasleys are exactly devoted to traditional mores," Astoria said.

"Indeed, they aren't," Riddle said, coming up behind them both. "It's one reason they're on the other side of out little war. Girl talk, ladies?"

"Gossip," Astoria said, rather primly, "is a significant way information is passed through informal channels."

Riddle laughed. "Go play with your fiancé, Astoria, and do your homework for Bella. We'll see you again next weekend. Narcissa's having a party for some of my… associates… and I'm quite sure your little friends will be eager to have you tell them all about it."

Astoria made an elaborate curtsey, a deep bend of absolute courtesy rendered only slightly ironic by the trousers she was wearing. After she'd disappeared back into the house Riddle offered his arm to Bella, who took it, and they began to take a turn about the gardens.

"Any insight yet?" he asked.

"I never thought she was the twit Lucius did," Bella said, stopping to admire some of her sister's herb beds. Hemlock and pansies together; she remembered when Narcissa had planted those shortly after a visit from Mr. Parkinson. Lucius had moved on to find another bride for Draco without saying anything.

"Still," Riddle pressed. "There's quite a difference between 'not a twit' and the spell work she demonstrated for me."

Bella rolled her eyes. "Of course she's better now."

She went to move on but Riddle was planted on the path like one of her sister's toxic plants. "Explain," he said.

Bella sighed. "Most people, when they go to do something, they have endless little inhibitions constraining them. They remember doing poorly, having trouble learning a spell or being teased in class. They remember their parents being upset at some especially dramatic display of accidental magic. They're held back by these little things without even knowing it."

"I'm not," Riddle said, watching the woman. "You're not."

"You're not wholly sane," she said. "At least not the way most people count sanity. And Azkaban… it broke something in me."

Riddle nodded. "And she's been erased so all her little inhibitions are gone. Interesting. I wonder how she'll be at battle magic."

"Really?"

"No." He smiled as he helped her over a rough spot on the path. "I suspect she'll be rather terrifying and immoral."

"I prefer to think of it as amoral," Bella said.

"Po-tay-to, Po-tah-to," Riddle said.

. . . . . . . . . .

 _ **A/N – One of these days I'll get a burst of creativity for this one.**_


	8. Chapter 8

"So, how'd it go?" Ginny asked as she painted the red polish onto her toenails.

Astoria shrugged as she looked at her finished toes. Would she know how to do a drying charm? She considered it and then decided that probably not and began waving her hands near her feet to try to get the paint to dry faster.

Ginny threw her a look of barely concealed disdain. "Do you want me to charm them dry?" she asked.

"You know how?" Astoria let herself sound impressed and, with a quick flourish of her wand, Ginny had the polish dry. Astoria sighed and said, "Ugg. It's good to hang out with you, Gin. This weekend everyone was so tense. There's some mystery guest I wasn't supposed to know about but I kept overhearing little bits of this and that. I guess they're having some party next weekend for a bunch of this guy's friends. Draco wants me to go back for it but I dunno. Being around his parents isn't exactly fun."

She let herself sense the way Ginny got excited. How, she wondered, would this girl talk her into going back into the snake pit for a party with people who supposedly disliked her.

"Is Draco being nice to you?" the girl asked and Astoria admired the way she had the sense to not just push her towards the party directly.

"Yeah," she said, leaning back against the bed. "He's so sweet, Ginny, and so smart. I just love to listen to him talk. He talked to me about Quidditch moves for _hours_."

"I didn't know you liked Quidditch that much," Ginny said.

"Oh, I don't," Astoria said. "But I like to hear him talk about it. He's so wonderful to me. His parents, well, I can tell they wish I were different but he's been so kind and so good to me."

She wondered if she were laying it on too thick. Surely no one would believe _anyone_ would sit around and listen to her boyfriend talk about some tedious subject for hours and then praise him for it. Ginny, however, didn't seem to have any problems thinking dumb little Astoria would put up with crap like that. All she said was, "Huh. Well, I'm glad he's being so nice to you."

Astoria bent forward to look at the red toenail polish. Had Ginny picked one that was flecked with gold as an actual insult to her supposed friend's Slytherin connections or was this the only polish she had? "I wish he had more time for me at school," Astoria continued. "But he's in so many advanced classes and he and Pansy like to spend a lot of time together when we're here."

Ginny smothered what might have been a snicker.

"Oh," Astoria looked over at her. "They've been friends since they were children. It's not like that."

"I'm sure it's not," Ginny agreed.

Besides, Astoria thought, wondering if she could get away with changing this polish to green and silver when she got back to her room, Pansy and Theodore Nott plan to announce their engagement as soon as they graduate. She's perfectly happy to leave Draco and his mother to me. The two of us will plan little Death Eater soirees together and gossip over expensive chocolates while you, well, you'll be lying dead on the ground of some battlefield I suspect.

"Maybe if he has more time for you at home you should go there next weekend," Ginny suggested. "I mean, do you really spend a lot of time with his parents?"

"Not really," Astoria admitted, "though if I have to help chat up a bunch of Mr. Malfoy's political friends it might be more time than I'd like."

"Still, better than being here." Ginny dried her toes and capped her nail polish. "Just talk to them about Quidditch."

. . . . . . . . . .

"She may be the stupidest woman I have ever known," Ginny ranted. "Are all the Slytherin girls mindless drones or did we just get extra unlucky?"

"I think they all are pretty much bred to say 'Yes, dear' and 'Whatever you want, dear' and 'Throw a party for fifty Death Eaters? Anything for you, dear'," Ron said, shoving a chocolate frog in his mouth. "Mum could have married into that lot, you know. Pureblood bigots love a Prewett. But she had the good sense to stay away from them."

"I could marry into that lot," Ginny said, making a face. "Let's see… should I take Theodore Nott, junior Death Eater, or Blaise Zabini, carefully neutral and lecherous?"

"How about Greg Goyle?" Hermione suggested with a smirk. "Thickest man alive."

"In more ways than one," Ron snorted. "Someone needs to lay off the cupcakes at dinner."

"Did I tell you I managed to only have red and gold toenail polish?" Ginny said, leaning back and laughing. "Our pet Slytherin is sporting our colors."

"You are so bad," Ron said, appreciation obvious in his tone. "And I say go for one of the older snakes if you want to roll in the mud. Maybe Flint or Montague? I hear Pucey's having trouble finding a bride."

Ginny shoved at him and he laughed.

"More to the point," Hermione said, opening up one of her tomes and pulling out a quill, "Did you get our little potted plant to spill any dirt? Because if all you do is paint her toenails, you're torturing yourself for nothing."

"There was a 'mystery guest' she didn't get to meet," Ginny said, and all the other students tensed and leaned forward. " _And_ ," she added, "there's a party next weekend for this guy's friends. Anyone want to guess who this might be?"

"I'm thinking not Remus Lupin and the Society for Lycanthropy Research," Hermione said with an arch look.

"You think?" Ron said around another chocolate frog.

"Merlin," Hermione snapped. "Can't you chew with your mouth closed? What are you, four?"

"I think I talked her into going back for it," Ginny said. "She didn't want to. The Malfoys aren't nice to her except for Draco."

"Who wants to get in her knickers," Ron muttered.

"So do you, so let's not be too high and mighty about that one," snapped Ginny.

Ron shrugged. "I don't plan on having to marry the bint to shag her."

"Oh, well, thank Merlin for small favors," Ginny said. "I'm not sure I could take Astoria Greengrass as a sister-in-law. She's bad enough as a best friend." She made a face. "Draco talks to her about Quidditch."

"What's so awful about Quidditch?" Ron asked.

"Nothing," said Ginny, "except she doesn't like it but is grateful the prat spends time talking to her. She likes the sound of his voice so much she's happy to sit and listen to him talk about anything."

"Eww," Hermione said.

"In all fairness," Harry spoke up for the first time, "It's not like she has much to add to a conversation. What's he supposed to talk to her about? Politics?"

"That would be helpful," Hermione said. "I care a bit more what the Malfoys have to say about policy and such than I do about Draco Malfoy's opinions on the Wronksi Feint."

"I'm surprised you even know what that is," Ron said and then flinched when Hermione snacked him in the arm with her heavy book. "No need to abuse me," he muttered.

"Well, maybe after the little Death Eater party next weekend she'll have something useful to report," Ginny said. 

"Or not," Hermione said with a sigh. "Anyone want to bet not?"

. . . . . . . . .

Astoria frowned at her red toes. "Nice color," Pansy said and Astoria narrowed her eyes at the closest thing she had to a friend in the Slytherin dorms.

"Don't start in on me," Astoria finally said as she changed to color to silver with a flick of her wand. "That Weasley girl may drive me to murder before she's done."

. . . . . . . . . .

Astoria, dressed in her Hogwarts uniform as per Narcissa's suggestion, smiled her bland little smile at Thoros Nott as he gazed down at her. Theodore's father seemed amused and curious that Narcissa had included a schoolgirl in this gathering but willing to bide his time until the plot was revealed in full. He certainly didn't demand to know why she was there instead of off studying charms.

Or, rather, off studying the Dark arts, which was what she had done all afternoon with Bellatrix. The woman had started with simple hexes and by the time they had had to stop to dress for dinner they'd been shooting deadly curses at one another. At the end of their bout, Bellatrix had lowered her wand and, breathing hard, said, "You're not bad."

"I almost had you," Astoria had said, bending over and trying to catch her own breath.

"Play again next visit?" Bellatrix had suggested and Astoria had allowed a genuine smile to bloom on her face.

"And what shall I tell dear Ginevra I'm doing?"

Behind them both Tom Riddle, lounging in a chair on the patio, had laughed. "Tell her Draco's mother hired a tutor for you lest you embarrass the Malfoys with a poor showing on your exams?"

Bellatrix had pushed some of her hair out of her face and had flopped down into a seat next to Riddle with a laugh. "I never thought I'd be tutoring a school girl but, Tom, I don't think this will get covered on her exams."

"Probably not," the man had admitted, taking her hand and twining his fingers through hers. "Still, you do make a wonderful tutor, Madame Lestrange."

"May I go?" Astoria had asked politely and Tom Riddle waved a hand toward her, dismissing her. Now she stood, costumed in her innocent skirt and button down shirt as Thoros Nott smiled at her. "I'm sorry if I don't remember you," she said with the perfect manners that had survived her curse intact. "I was on the receiving end of a memory curse and lost a great deal."

Nott nodded. "Theo had mentioned something about that. I'm quite sorry. Dumbledore, I take it?"

Astoria blinked at him a few times. "I don't know if a culprit was ever determined," she said.

"Well, it wasn't Riddle," Nott said dismissively. "He would have just killed you. And Lockhart's been incapacitated for several years. Had to have been Dumbledore; no one else has the skill."

Astoria nodded.

"She's our little double agent," Tom said, coming up behind Astoria. "She'll go back and tell her handler all about the party tonight."

Astoria shrugged, a graceful little gesture. "It's unfortunate I'm so utterly insipid I remember more about the stemware – which is very nice – than the conversations. And I'm terribly bad with names. But I'm sure I'll remember whatever you'd like me to."

Riddle regarded the glass in his hand. "Narcissa does have exquisite taste. Be sure to admire her cunning centerpiece. I thought the snake and mouse skull arrangement was genius." He turned to Thoros Nott. "Are you ready to be publicly named?"

"I am but a cog in the wheel of your larger plans," Nott said.

"Then, my dear Astoria, see if you can remember dear Thoros. I'm sure because Draco's friends with Theodore the name will have stuck in your empty little head."

Astoria bobbed a little curtsey and, recognizing the dismissal in Riddle expression, drifted back towards Draco.

"An interesting tool," Thoros observed.

Tom Riddle smiled. "Not one I would have thought to pick out," he admitted. "However, if Dumbledore is going to shove the girl into my lap I'll make use of her."

"I think I might have accidentally confirmed it was Dumbledore who cursed the chit," Thoros said, his eyes resting appreciatively on the curve of her arse under the short skirt. "I do apologize if keeping that a secret was a part of your larger plan."

Riddle shrugged. "She'd mostly reasoned it out on her own. I'd planned to confirm it before I pointed her at the man. I'm still loading her up with offensive skills at the moment."

"Is she any good?"

Riddle regarded the girl. Draco had his arm around her and she was smiling up at him with a look of proper, vacuous adoration. "She'll be as good as Bella in a few months," the man said. "She's marvelous. Cold as a snake and lies as well as Narcissa."

Thoros sighed. "And to think I turned down a betrothal contract for her and Theodore. She just seemed so… stupid."

"Yes," Riddle smiled across the room. "She really does, doesn't she?"


End file.
